Tom Matlack There’s a gash under my left eye, my right thumb throbs like a son-of-a-bitch, and I keep seeing stars. My whole body hurts. I have a red beard—if you can call it that—after a week of uneven growth. On the plane ride home from Florida to Boston, people look at me like I’m some kind of pirate and wonder where the patch is for my battered eye. After all, at 45, I’m too old for this. I’m thinking back to my college...

Thomas Matlack Thomas Matlack was Chief Financial Officer of The Providence Journal until 1997. He was the lead investor in the Art Technology Group, which reached $5 billion in market capitalization in 2001. He founded and ran his own venture firm from 1998 to 2010, before turning to writing. He is the founder of The Good Men Project. ___________________________ I happened to meet a major vendor of Verizon’s new FiOS effort at a...

Ryan McCarl First, question everything, beginning with the political ideas you inherited from your parents, family, community, church, and school. Create an inventory, in your mind or on paper, of these ideas: what are your strong, visceral, “gut” feelings about the political parties, religion in schools, the legalization versus criminalization of abortion, taxation, drug laws, and so on? What about your ideas about other races and...

Benjamin Lockerd “Eliot’s reputation as a critic of society has been worse than his record”—so wrote Roger Kojecký at the beginning of his 1971 book, T. S. Eliot’s Social Criticism.1 Thirty-five years later, the situation has not changed, for T. S. Eliot’s cultural criticism continues to be more maligned than studied. It is not uncommon to hear Eliot accused of having “flirted with fascism” and of having proposed the...

Jascha Kessler The title of the following observations might better be offered as, “…from wanton destruction by the present heirs and/or occupiers of the lands of their original creators.” As we were sadly aware, immediately upon the lightning-swift liberation of Baghdad after a campaign of less than four weeks it was discovered, even as guns were still rattling outside, that the Iraq National Museum had been despoiled by gangs of...

Ryan McCarl Human beings have strong emotional immune systems, and human societies have a remarkable capacity for collective forgetfulness. Milan Kundera, writing of the effect of the news cycle on historical memory, once said: “The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the war in the Sinai desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai,...

Erik Tucker At the dawn of what many hope will turn out to be a 2009 version of “Morning in America,” we are confronted with a litany of challenges that are making even our strongest of willed nation buckle at the knees. While discussions of credit default swaps, subprime mortgage foreclosures, and economic stimulus dominate both the airwaves and the front pages of our republic’s ever-dwindling newspaper circulation, it is the...

Jascha Kessler The assumption that “contemporary history” is also manifested in “contemporary literature” is one of those notions with a long tradition. It can be traced back in critical discourse to Aristotle’s Poetics, in which he remarked that poetry is superior to history. The metaphysical problem underlying historical writing was already present in Plato’s The Sophist: where it is asked whether “history,” a narrative...

Joseph Wagner The U.S. is currently engaged in a landmark debate over what role government should play in confronting our economic crisis and in shaping the future. Too much of the discourse by politicians and pundits seem woefully ill-informed about the historical record and is tragically misguided about Democratic and Republican policies. The charts below contrast the economic policies of Republican and Democratic Presidents since World...

(A supplement to her poem I Want To Make You Safe) “The costs – a few billion dollars a month plus a few dozen American fatalities (a figure which will probably diminish, and which is in any case comparable to the number of US motorcyclists killed because of repealed helmet laws) – are negligible compared to $30 trillion in oil wealth, assured American geopolitical supremacy and cheap gas for voters. In terms of...