pays de naissance

Identity politics: or why demographic sticker shock is no excuse.

I really wasn’t going to write about the election. It’s been covered quite well elsewhere already. I think Dan Hodges’ piece on the subject in The Telegraph nails it: For years the GOP has been sitting on a ticking demographic time bomb. And this was the election it finally detonated. The Democrats already went into

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An update, and some thoughts on pessimism.

There are a lot of titles I could have gone with, here. LA Story. LA Confidential. Down And Out in the Magic Kingdom. Postcards from the Edge. American Idiot. But nothing I can think of really fits. I’m still stuck in the United States. I’m staying with my former roommate from my Seattle years, and

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On the death of bin Laden

Like many of my generation, I greeted the death of Osama bin Laden with frantic text messaging. Then tweeting, then emailing and strangely, housekeeping. At three a.m., I turned on a vacuum. Two minutes later, I shut it off. The BBC continued confirming what I had heard hours earlier. He was dead. We had killed

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A rapist in every Jefferies tube: Detroit, design, and our dreams of space

A friend linked me to this stunning gallery of photos at the Guardian of Detroit, in ruins. As noted in the margins, large swathes of Detroit now more closely resemble the set of a post-apocalyptic film than they do an actual city. Aged and beautiful buildings have been left to rot. Even the books are

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