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Good at Being Gods

Caleb Crain: Buckminster Fuller’s Visions, 18 December 2008

Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe 
edited by K. Michael Hays and Dana Miller.
Yale, 257 pp., £35, July 2008, 978 0 300 12620 4
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... renaissance of environmental technology, but it won’t be possible to order it from a catalogue. Barack Obama, caught on tape during a debate-prep session last year, identified the need for a collective solution: ‘We can’t solve global warming because I fucking changed light bulbs in my ...

‘This is Africa, after all. What can you expect?’

Bernard Porter: Corruption and Post-Imperialism, 26 March 2009

It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower 
by Michela Wrong.
Fourth Estate, 354 pp., £12.99, February 2009, 978 0 00 724196 5
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... a kind of corruption (‘pork-barrel’), and it remains to be seen whether this will change under Barack Obama. The 2000 presidential contest was hardly a model of electoral propriety. It can be argued that the old Labour-Conservative see-saw in British politics was much about whose ‘turn’ it was to eat, or to eat well – which class’s turn, that ...

All Eat All

Jenny Diski: The Cannibal in Me, 6 August 2009

An Intellectual History of Cannibalism 
by Catalin Avramescu, translated by Alistair Ian Blyth.
Princeton, 350 pp., £17.95, May 2009, 978 0 691 13327 0
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... the night of his very own room where he found his supper waiting for him. And it was still hot. Barack Obama read this to an audience of children on the White House lawn last Easter. Make of that what you will. Though I’ve yet to put it to the test, I’m with Montaigne in finding myself less than horrified at the idea of being eaten, provided I’m ...

In Need of a New Myth

Eric Foner: American Myth-Making, 4 July 2024

A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America 
by Richard Slotkin.
Harvard, 512 pp., £29.95, March, 978 0 674 29238 3
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... of today’s culture war politics, focused on disputes over immigration. The electoral success of Barack Obama, despite the radical right’s denial of his status as an American citizen, helped to propel the Myth of the Movement forwards. At the same time, it inspired a resurgence of racialised nationalism. This was exemplified in hostility to the ...

Get a Brazilian

Maggie Doherty: Millennial Memoirists, 13 September 2018

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis 
by J.D. Vance.
William Collins, 257 pp., £9.99, June 2017, 978 0 00 822056 3
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The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath 
by Leslie Jamison.
Granta, 544 pp., £20, May 2018, 978 1 78378 152 2
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How to Murder Your Life: A Memoir 
by Cat Marnell.
Ebury, 384 pp., £7.99, February 2018, 978 0 09 195736 0
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Everything I Know about Love 
by Dolly Alderton.
Fig Tree, 336 pp., £12.99, February 2018, 978 0 241 32271 0
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This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America 
by Morgan Jerkins.
Harper Collins, 272 pp., £10.99, February 2018, 978 0 06 266615 4
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Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials 
by Malcolm Harris.
Little Brown, 272 pp., £18.99, February 2018, 978 0 316 51086 8
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Educated: A Memoir 
by Tara Westover.
Hutchinson, 385 pp., £14.99, February 2018, 978 1 78633 051 2
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... these imperfect institutions entirely. Millennials​ came to public notice around the same time Barack Obama did. It’s hard to remember the optimism of that historical moment, before the 2013 government shutdown and the fights over Obamacare, before the deportations and drone strikes, before Trump. Many US millennials cast their first vote – for ...

The Corrupt Bargain

Eric Foner: Democracy? No thanks, 21 May 2020

Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? 
by Alexander Keyssar.
Harvard, 544 pp., £28.95, May, 978 0 674 66015 1
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Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College 
by Jesse Wegman.
St Martin’s Press, 304 pp., $24.50, March, 978 1 250 22197 1
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... and Nebraska allocate some of their electors by results in congressional districts. (In 2008, Barack Obama carried a Nebraska district, winning one of that solidly Republican state’s five electoral votes.) Winner-takes-all maximises a state’s impact on the outcome, but also makes more likely a mismatch between the winner of the popular vote and ...

The Debate

Eliot Weinberger, 26 September 2024

... but they didn’t stick, since Harris is attached to no known scandals. He tried the old ‘Barack HUSSEIN Obama’ un-American birther line, deliberately mispronouncing her name at his rallies and spelling it ‘Kamabla’ – rather oblique as a joke – on his incessant Truth Social posts. He called her a ...

Diary

Ben Lerner: On Disliking Poetry, 18 June 2015

... unites the futurist and the nostalgist and is a staple of mainstream denunciations of poetry. When Barack Obama announced that he would revive the practice of having a poem read at his 2009 inauguration – Clinton had done it twice; Kennedy had done it in 1961 – many scoffed. George Packer wondered on the New Yorker’s website: ‘Is it too late to ...

The Superhuman Upgrade

Steven Shapin: The Book That Explains It All, 13 July 2017

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow 
by Yuval Noah Harari.
Vintage, 528 pp., £9.99, March 2017, 978 1 78470 393 6
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... to the present in a punchy four hundred pages, it was an international bestseller, endorsed by Barack Obama and tagged as essential reading by Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. There were TED talks, public lectures, a dedicated YouTube channel, a hugely popular online course, speeches to the futurologists at Google and the Singularity University in ...

Merely an Empire

David Thomson: Eighteen Hours in Vietnam, 21 September 2017

The Vietnam War 
directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick.
PBS, ten episodes
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... under George H.W. Bush, yet he went on to campaign for the Democratic senator Bob Kerrey and Barack Obama. He leaves drugs out of his list of rivulets because, I’d guess, he was above them. In close-up he has a white-bearded hawk of a face, with the clear eyes of a fighter pilot. He made me think of James Salter and his code of taciturn ...

Thriving on Chaos

Patrick Cockburn: After al-Baghdadi, 21 November 2019

... thirty miles west of Baghdad, and that the Iraqi army could not get them out. Earlier that month Barack Obama had told David Remnick of the New Yorker that, compared to al-Qaida, IS was a junior varsity basketball team playing out of its league; a few months later its fighters emerged from the desert to defeat six Iraqi army divisions and capture ...

Clunk, Clack, Swish

Jon Day: Watching the Snooker, 8 February 2024

Unbreakable 
by Ronnie O’Sullivan.
Seven Dials, 262 pp., £22, May 2023, 978 1 3996 1001 8
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... from Iron Maiden. When the journalist asked O’Sullivan, he paused for a moment then replied: ‘Barack Obama.’ O’Sullivan is widely acknowledged to be the most naturally gifted snooker player – if not one of the most talented sportspeople – there has ever been. He began playing in the clubs of North-East London when he was seven. On a recent ...

Solve, Struggle, Invent

Rachel Nolan: Cuba Speaks, 6 June 2024

How Things Fall Apart: What Happened to the Cuban Revolution 
by Elizabeth Dore.
Apollo, 341 pp., £10.99, August 2023, 978 1 80328 381 4
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The Tribe: Portraits of Cuba 
by Carlos Manuel Álvarez, translated by Frank Wynne and Rahul Bery.
Fitzcarraldo, 336 pp., £12.99, May 2022, 978 1 913097 91 2
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... arrivals find themselves in the more challenging situation of being considered migrants.In 2014, Barack Obama and Raúl Castro came to an agreement to normalise diplomatic relations. It wasn’t really noticed at the time that thawing relations would also mean phasing out special provisions for Cuban immigrants, who had previously been ...

Short Cuts

Deborah Friedell: Reading J.D. Vance, 24 October 2024

... classmates thought of him as a nice one. He wrote in the New York Times about his admiration for Barack Obama, and a classmate, Sofia Nelson, remembers that whatever Vance’s qualms about abortion, ‘what he relayed to me is what his grandmother had taught him, which is that you can never know what situation a woman is in when she’s making that ...

Enabler’s Revenge

David Runciman: John Edwards, 25 March 2010

The Politician: An Insider’s Account of John Edwards’s Pursuit of the Presidency and the Scandal That Brought Him Down 
by Andrew Young.
Thomas Dunne, 301 pp., $24.99, January 2010, 978 0 312 64065 1
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Race of a Lifetime: How Obama Won the White House 
by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin.
Viking, 448 pp., £25, January 2010, 978 0 670 91802 7
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... of The American President and originator of The West Wing, which more or less mapped out Obama’s run for the presidency before it happened; in that sense, only Hillary Clinton was ‘real’.) The response of Edwards’s formidable wife, Elizabeth, to the loss of Wade was to abandon her own successful legal career in order to undergo fertility ...

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