History in an Age of Fake News
In the Chronicle Review, I tried to work through my frequently conflicted feelings about teaching, politics, history, and ideology, especially in this moment of intense polarization. We work and live in a […]
Category Archives: Essays
A New Hope for Mexico?: A close look at Mexico’s 2018 elections and the candidacy of Andrés Manuel López Obrador
UPDATE 07/06/2018: After the election results, Carlos and I returned to Dissent to analyze the results. My friend Carlos Bravo Regidor and I grew frustrated with the international coverage of […]
The Spy Who Funded Me: Review of Campaigning Culture in the LARB
In the Los Angeles Review of Books, I have a review of Campaigning Culture: The Journals of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, edited by Giles Scott-Smith and Charlotte Lerg. IN […]
Socialism’s Return, in The Nation
In my debut in The Nation‘s Books & the Arts section, I have an essay based on a reading of Bernie Sanders’s two campaign books and two volumes of essays by the left-wing […]
Fidel Castro (1926-2016), Without Illusions
I have a somewhat late-breaking obituary of Fidel Castro, up now at Dissent magazine. Rather than a straight obit, I’ve tried to take stock of the different responses to Fidel on […]
A Defense of Academic Twitter
At Inside Higher Ed, I have a how-to guide to academic Twitter with a prologue on academic precarity and public engagement. “Precarity helped create the new public scholar,” I argue: […]
The Two Lefts of Jorge Castañeda
Update 5/3/2016: this essay has been published in Spanish by Nexos. I’m honored to be making my debut in Dissent, a magazine I greatly admire. To my mind, Irving Howe navigated […]
