The Editor’s Desk

Read more Jen Sorensen comics at her website slowpokecomics.com.

Even though apparently every Democrat was reading Nate Silver and knew exactly how the election would pan out, I witnessed a significant sense of relief last Wednesday, and then watched the euphoria build as political analysts unpacked the message President Obama’s victory sent: Republicans cannot continue to be the party of angry white men and […]

“This year’s presidential election campaign shapes up as just about the emptiest and the most depressing in living memory,” wrote Tony Thomas, former American business editor of The Economist, in a recent essay about American culture for Contemporary Review, a quarterly magazine that has published continuously from Oxford since 1866. Thomas’ piece is really about […]

I’ve had a couple encounters in the past week with what friend and sometime contributor Jim Barns likes to call the small town department. When I first moved here for the job and wrote something that piqued his interest, Jim would write to me from the small town department and explain the connection between two […]

Josh Garrett-Davis, a young author and historian who read at The Bridge/ PAI last week, wrote a kind of personal eulogy for George McGovern that ran in the New York Times Monday and that could have been titled “Lefty’s Lament: The death of liberal populism.” Garrett-Davis grew up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to hippie […]

Life’s patterns seem almost geometrical at times. When I was a kid my family went, for special occasions, to a Japanese restaurant on a quiet stretch of Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, D.C., just blocks from the working entrance of the Japanese Embassy. The Mikado was a typical Japanese restaurant of its time, impossibly formal with […]

There is a difference between comprehensive planning and comprehensive reasoning, but they share the same oxymoronic nature. Last week the City Council voted not to grant Matteus Frankovich and the Black Market Moto Saloon the special use permit the business needs to host live music, saying it was not part of the city’s comprehensive plan for […]

As a Cold War baby, though, I mistrust the notion of resistance in our well-lubricated world. Sooner or later, everyone wants a taste of the good life. I guess that’s the understated requiem for American counterculture composed by our Boomer forefathers and -mothers.

Before I fell in love with America, I fell in love with the rest of the world. I guess it had to do with growing up in Washington, D.C., a place full of people from everywhere else. I memorized the flags that hung outside the sandstone townhouses on Embassy Row. Hey mom, where’s Equatorial Guinea? […]