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 […]
Category Archives: Intellectuals
On the “Understanding Latin American Politics” podcast with Greg Weeks
I’m on podcast #33 of the very informative “Understanding Latin American Politics” podcast with Greg Weeks. We talk about how I got started doing the kind of work that I […]
Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America has won the 2017 Luciano Tomassini Prize
My book, Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America, was released on September 14, 2015 by Harvard University Press. It ships (Amazon, Powell’s). It can be purchased […]
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 […]
“Literary Agents,” my review of Joel Whitney’s “Finks”
Up now at the New Republic (and in the January 2017 print edition), my review of Joel Whitney’s “Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers.” The introduction: Czeslaw […]
The Lost Poems of Pablo Neruda: A Conversation with Tess Taylor
The wonderful poet Tess Taylor and I had a conversation about “Then Come Back,” a collection of recently-discovered unpublished poems by Pablo Neruda. It is up now at the Barnes & Noble […]
How Karl Polanyi makes sense of our politics
Update 2/20/2017: I have a related essay in the Chronicle Review, assessing Gareth Dale’s Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left. Karl Polanyi’s arguments keep getting trotted out, thought I, without […]
Review of Rafael Rojas, “Fighting over Fidel”
My review, titled “Words are the Weapons, the Weapons Must Go,” of Rafael Rojas’s “Fighting over Fidel: The New York Intellectuals and the Cuban Revolution,” has appeared in the Los […]
A review of Jorge García Robles, “At the End of the Road: Jack Kerouac in Mexico”
This review will appear in the Journal of Latin American Studies; at least until it does, I’m reasonably certain that I can host it here. Jorge García-Robles, At the End […]
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 […]
