By James North Studs Terkel was the smartest person I ever met, and the greatest single influence on me as a writer. He was much more than his folksy, cigar-chomping red-checked-shirt persona, authentic as that was. The last time I…
Yesterday I teed off on a New Yorker profile of Hank Greenberg that I felt had provided cover to Greenberg’s Israel-centered views of the Middle East. I don’t keep up on the New Yorker, but a friend sent along the…
A few months back a friend told me that the business of this blog was to produce the prose equivalent of the classic French movie, La Guerre Est Finie. In that movie, a Communist played by Yves Montand comes to…
My friend James North headed off to Bolivia today for the book he’s writing on the effects on the Third World of the globalized economy, but offered me the following thoughts on the cultural ramifications of the financial crisis: Read…
By James North More current issues have pushed Darfur to the sidelines for now, but here’s a fascinating letter in the Financial Times from a southern Sudanese, John Achiek Deng. He is quite persuasive when he says: “In southern Sudan,…
I spoke to my friend James North today on the phone and he made the following points about the financial crisis that I think are worth hearing. I’m paraphrasing, except where I quote: There’s a famous joke that leftwing economists…
Another in the series, How to Think About Darfur, by James North: Here’s a link to the most important single magazine article I have read over at least the past 5 years; it appeared in the British publication Prospect. Bartle…
James North, reporting from Mexico: I´ve only been here three days, but I can see once again why Americans are so ill-informed about the rest of the world. The news reports here have been filled with coverage of three gigantic…
Another in a series, “How to Think About Darfur,” by James North When I started looking into Darfur, I said right at the start that I was suspicious that the solidarity movement, or at least some part of it, was…