Festival of Punishment

Thomas Laqueur: On Death Row, 5 October 2000

Proximity to Death 
by William McFeely.
Norton, 206 pp., £17.95, January 2000, 0 393 04819 5
Show More
Death Row: The Encyclopedia of Capital Punishment 
edited by Bonnie Bobit.
Bobit, 311 pp., $24.95, September 1999, 0 9624857 6 4
Show More
Show More
... race with toughness on crime, refused clemency. Graham’s behaviour was typical of the new South. Bill Clinton’s followed the same pattern. In his first term as Governor of Arkansas he was regarded as anti-capital punishment and in more than twenty murder cases declined to set execution dates. He lost the 1980 election and came back in 1982 with the ...

The Greatest Geek

Richard Barnett: Nikola Tesla, 5 February 2015

Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age 
by W. Bernard Carlson.
Princeton, 520 pp., £19.95, April 2015, 978 0 691 05776 7
Show More
Show More
... in Belgrade. But the Feds were not the only ones who had been taken in. Tesla had settled a $400 bill at the Governor Clinton Hotel with a box containing, he claimed, a fully functioning model of his weapon, which would explode if ‘an unauthorised person’ were to tamper with it. After his death Trump went to ...

Here We Go Again

Misha Glenny, 9 March 1995

... of many thoroughbred stablemates from Milosevic through Hans Dietrich Genscher and on to President Clinton and Senator Dole. Can anything be done before the cauldron bubbles over in April and May? For once, the main international players (Germany, France, Britain, Russia, the US and the UN) are trying to co-ordinate their game. They have created a plan which ...

Diary

Christopher Hitchens: The Candidates for the 2000 Presidency, 6 January 2000

... Adonis who has significantly narrowed the gender gap and who has a literal belief in the New Deal. Bill Bradley – boring and pompous and tenth-rate but used to play basketball and take showers with African Americans. John McCain – nobody’s idea of an intellectual but likes to talk dirty and got himself shot down while scattering high explosives over ...

Too Close to the USA

Michael Byers: Canada’s reluctance to stand up for itself, 6 September 2001

... or Toronto. Canadian taxpayers, meanwhile, would be asked to foot a substantial portion of the bill for missile defence – although the bulk of the jobs and profits would go to the United States. Yet the Canadian Government appears poised to offer its full co-operation. Although the Defence Minister, Art Eggleton, insists that it is still too early to ...

Plan Colombia

Malcolm Deas, 5 April 2001

... Ireland and the Middle East is meanwhile left a complete blank. Danner simply doesn’t fill the bill. Colombia needs military aid: why should a beleaguered democratic government not receive US support? The question may look unsophisticated, but sophistication is not always the best response; as Disraeli said, ‘When your house is on fire … you send for ...

Repeal the 20th Century

William Davies: Pre-MAGA, 25 September 2025

When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists and the Origins of Trumpism 
by John Ganz.
Penguin, 426 pp., £10.99, June, 978 1 4059 8169 9
Show More
Show More
... World Wide Web made its first appearance. The period is encapsulated by the excruciating video of Bill Gates and his colleagues dancing on stage at Microsoft’s Windows 1995 launch, the equally cringeworthy video of the entire Democratic National Convention doing the ‘macarena’ a year later (both are on YouTube), or the sitcom Friends, in which ...
Secret Affairs: Franklin Roosevelt, Cordell Hull and Sumner Welles 
by Irwin Gellman.
Johns Hopkins, 499 pp., $29.95, April 1995, 0 8018 5083 5
Show More
Closest Companion: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship between Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley 
edited by Geoffrey Ward.
Houghton Mifflin, 444 pp., $24.95, April 1995, 0 395 66080 7
Show More
No Ordinary Time. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War Two 
by Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Simon and Schuster, 759 pp., £18, June 1995, 0 671 64240 5
Show More
The End of Reform 
by Alan Brinkley.
Knopf, 371 pp., $27.50, March 1995, 0 394 53573 1
Show More
Show More
... spite of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s best efforts in The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys) and the Clinton farce. Doris Kearns Goodwin turns the unorthodox Roosevelt marital arrangements from sordid scandal into generous love. No Ordinary Time challenges the current right-wing support of ‘traditional family values’, for those who lived at the Roosevelt ...

Sure looks a lot like conservatism

Didier Fassin: Macronisme, 5 July 2018

Revolution Française: Emmanuel Macron and the Quest to Reinvent a Nation 
by Sophie Pedder.
Bloomsbury, 297 pp., £25, June 2018, 978 1 4729 4860 1
Show More
Show More
... of impressive PR skills, on the international stage especially. From Thatcher to Blair, Reagan to Clinton, this formula has been characteristic of Western democracies in recent decades. To many, it was a surprise – and a shock – that the guest of honour at Macron’s first 14 July celebration was Donald Trump, whose style seems the exact opposite. But the ...

Naderland

Jackson Lears: Ralph Nader’s novel, 8 April 2010

Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! 
by Ralph Nader.
Seven Stories, 733 pp., $27.50, September 2009, 978 1 58322 903 3
Show More
Show More
... began, and Nader was reduced to rear-guard defences of existing regulations. By the mid-1990s, the Clinton administration made clear that the Democrats had also moved to the right, along with much of the ‘liberal media’, led by the Washington Post and New York Times. Recoiling from the Democrats’ right turn and the corporate-sponsored banality of public ...

Give your mom a gun

Geoff Mann: America’s Favourite Gun, 7 March 2024

American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15 
by Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson.
Farrar, Straus, 473 pp., £25, September 2023, 978 0 374 10385 9
Show More
Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture and Control in Cold War America 
by Andrew C. McKevitt.
North Carolina, 319 pp., £24.95, November 2023, 978 1 4696 7724 8
Show More
Show More
... calibre rounds.In February 2023, Barry Moore, a Republican congressman from Alabama, introduced a bill in the US House of Representatives to ‘declare an AR-15-style rifle chambered in a .223 Remington round or a 5.56 x 45mm Nato round to be the National Gun of the United States’. The resolution was co-sponsored by three other Republicans: Lauren Boebert ...

A State of One’s Own

Jeremy Harding: Kosovo, 19 August 1999

... it not? – and it would put an end to a terrible historic curse. And if not the next leader, then Clinton – ‘Yes, tell Clinton to do it.’ Marinkovic removed his dark blue peaked hat, ran his fingers over his cropped white hair and then replaced the hat, making the final adjustments with unreasonable care. He proffered ...

Angry White Men

R.W. Johnson: Obama’s Electoral Arithmetic, 20 October 2011

... vote had rallied strongly to Truman. Without it Dewey would have won by 267 to 225. Carter and Clinton (twice) could not have gained office without the black vote; indeed Johnson in 1964 was the last Democrat to win a majority of the white vote. He used his victory to push through the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, observing that this meant ...

The Inequality Problem

Ed Miliband, 4 February 2016

... Hanauer is in the vanguard of the ‘Fight for 15’, the campaign for a $15 minimum wage. Like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who have also issued loud warnings about inequality, he is heir to a long tradition of social concern among the wealthy in the US. They have reason to be worried. The last time inequality reached comparable levels was shortly before ...

Keynesian in a Foxhole

Geoff Mann: The Monetarist Position, 13 April 2023

A Fiscal and Monetary History of the United States, 1961-2021 
by Alan Blinder.
Princeton, 432 pp., £35, October 2022, 978 0 691 23838 8
Show More
Show More
... who has been deeply involved in both fiscal and monetary policymaking, first as a member of Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and later as vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. But despite the allusion to Friedman and Schwartz in the book’s title, he is decidedly not a monetarist, but a Keynesian, a regular contributor to the Wall ...