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The Broken House of Race in America
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America is now in the midst of one of its periodic awakenings about race. Every generation or so, something happens to force race into the consciousness of mainstream America. Sometimes these awakenings lead to reform; sometimes they don’t. The current awakening arose from the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis and the growing realization (long…
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Halberstamitis
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David Halberstam wrote sprawling books about politics, war, sports, firefighters, mass media, show business, and everything in between. Halberstam looked for the universal in the particular and the particular. His prose sometimes reached. Sometimes he wanted to get dramatic while describing ordinary people and moments. And as he connected one observation to another —…
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Presidents and Metaphors
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President Barack Obama and the Republicans continue to wrestle over the nation’s debt and everything else under the sun — tax rates, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (and, by extension, Obamacare), education and R&D funding, the national parks and the space program, and in fact everything packed into the monstrosity known as the federal…