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Ex-President Obama: Ten Ironies

The irony on Thursday morning cable news was too delicious not to savor. MSDNC anchor Halle Jackson could barely contain her glee over how former president Barack Obama had finally “taken the gloves off” and gone after Donald Trump by name while campaigning for Joe Biden the previous day. I have no idea if Obama really did “take the gloves off” on Wednesday. I have my doubts. But whatever he did, he may have answered the bell too late. More

How Trump Killed 220,000 Americans: the First Three Months of Covid

Epidemiologists agree that early intervention is crucial for curbing the worst effects of pandemics. America’s decentralized, state-level, bureaucratic response systems needed a President willing and able to take charge. Trump did the opposite. In order to keep market confidence as high as possible, Trump kept telling the public that all was well, leaving underfunded and privatized bureaucracies to navigate through the chaos. More

A Day in My Life in the Time of Covid

Find the remote and flip on CNN to check the headlines, before immediately clicking it off, recalling my vow, made at least once a week, to never watch cable news again. I’ve taken similar vows about reading the New York Times, the Guardian and the Washington Post. But you can’t avoid them. They seek you out, relentlessly track you down, enter your mind, like it or not, like some cyber-Nosferatu, sucking your soul out before you’ve had the chance to fuel yourself with the day’s first bitter cup of Arabica. I think of Eliot’s line about J. Alfred measuring his days with “coffee spoons.” Mine, I fear, will be measured in email downloads. Ain’t it funny how time slips away during Covid and then slips back again, pretty much the same, only darker. More

Advertising vs. Democracy: An Interview with Jean Kilbourne

There it is, on page 56 of Jean Kilbourne’s book Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel: the graphic that stopped me cold and made me realize just how prophetic was her work (originally published in hardcover in 1999 as Deadly Persuasion: Why Women and Girls Must Fight the More

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