One of the great literary hoaxes of our time is the book spine. A staggering number of logos stare out from dust jackets, celebrating names including Crown, Vintage, Ballantine, Knopf, and Dial. But the pluralism implied by this diversity of monikers is a sham. In the U.S., nearly 100 of them belong to a single company: Penguin Random House. The rest are owned by a small handful of competitors, one of which is Simon & Schuster.
The title of Paul Manafort’s memoir, Political Prisoner, is ridiculous, but at least he’s writing what he knows. For much of his professional life, Manafort served as a lobbyist and an image consultant for the world’s most prolific torturers. One of his clients, the Angolan revolutionary Jonas Savimbi, led an army that incinerated its enemies alive.
Warning: This story contains graphic imagery.On the morning of March 4, a teacher was sheltering in a basement in Bucha, an old railroad stop northwest of Kyiv that over the centuries had grown into a verdant suburb. The town lay along the Russian military’s intended path of conquest, leading into the Ukrainian capital. And while the invaders struggled to realize their overarching plan, they gained a toehold in Bucha.At 7 a.m.
This morning, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed a Joint Session of the U.S. Congress from his desk in Kyiv, bitter thoughts must have crossed his mind. Not so long ago, Donald Trump wouldn’t let Mike Pence attend the Ukrainian president’s inauguration. Zelensky spent the first year of his administration begging for an invitation to the White House that never arrived.
When Hillary Clinton sought to sow doubts about Barack Obama, her rival for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, she ran an attack ad tarnishing him as dangerously inexperienced. As the screen shows images from a suburban house, a husky-voiced narrator intones: “It’s 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep, but there’s a phone in the White House and it’s ringing.” There’s clearly been a terrible international incident.
The right-wing media personality Candace Owens wants to warn the conservative movement about horny bears. In fact, she’s been waiting for five years to relay a factoid she promises will unlock everything.Strolling the stage at Orlando’s Rosen Shingle Creek Resort, Owens finally has her chance to address the true believers who have come to the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC. And she’s going to seize that moment.
Before he became the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky played the part on television. He created and starred in a comedy series, Servant of the People. His character, a high-school history teacher, is surreptitiously recorded by one of his students as he passionately rants against the tyranny of corruption in his nation. Without his knowledge, the video goes viral. Without campaigning or even wanting the job, the teacher is improbably elected president of Ukraine.
Paul Manafort came of age in New Britain, Connecticut. His father, the garrulous mayor of that decaying factory town, taught him how to cobble together an electoral coalition, passing down the tricks of the trade that became the basis for the son’s lucrative career as a political consultant. But as the local hardware manufacturers fled to foreign shores, the Mafia moved into town.
In 1960, Dwight Eisenhower’s attorney general, William Rogers, read the paper with alarm. He learned that Random House intended to purchase the venerable publisher Alfred A. Knopf. Rogers began making calls to prod his antitrust division into blocking the sale. In those days, monopoly loomed as a central concern of government—and a competitive book business was widely seen as essential to preserving both intellectual life and democracy.
After a caravan of Donald Trump’s supporters descended on Portland, Oregon, this weekend, aching to grapple, he praised them as “great patriots.” In cheering them on, Trump is pointing them, and others like them, toward a specific target. What he seeks to eliminate is politics itself.Politics is such a ubiquitous term in the English language, such a seemingly fixed part of American life, that its existence is assumed and its definition rarely considered.
When Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg testified on Capitol Hill two years ago, the hearings were an embarrassing exercise in congressional cluelessness. They furthered a cliché: The doddering American political elite, who sometimes seemed to confuse Messenger with the passenger pigeon, would never have the savvy to keep up with the dynamism of Big Tech, let alone regulate it.The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust thoroughly debunked that strand of conventional wisdom today.
Updated at 12:04 p.m. on June 6, 2020Over the course of his presidency, Donald Trump has indulged his authoritarian instincts—and now he’s meeting the common fate of autocrats whose people turn against them.