Sublime

Everything about him was peculiar, starting with motives—or at least what he believed his motives to be. He didn’t come right out with all of it on our walk, maybe because he realized how implausible it’d sound to a total stranger. He needed infinity dollars because he planned to address the biggest existential risks to life on earth: nuclear war,

Mellman coined the term permanent war economy to describe the American economy. Since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its tax dollars on past, current, and future military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government.

The Reagan era has reached its limits and can’t sustain the economy. The failure is in the process of creating a new set of competing social classes. This is reflected in the intensifying political crisis of the Trump presidency, in which the new social forces begin battling each other. This crisis will last through to the 2020s. In 2024, a new pre

In the class structure of Smart America, meritocrats occupy an important level. Above them sit the always-getting-richer very rich, whom they regard with loathing and envy, and at whom they direct a continuous barrage of critical fire. Most of the books and columns and gossip aimed at the 1 percent come from people just a few percentage points belo

Pincus left Harvard and founded his own research center, in Worcester, Massachusetts. His concern about the world “population explosion” led him to propose a study of contraception. Might there be a pill or a shot that could reliably suppress ovulation? It was a fine question, but Pincus couldn’t get funding to answer it, either from pharmaceutical

There’s another way to understand Just America, like the other three narratives, and that’s in terms of class. Why does so much of its work take place in human resources departments, reading lists, and awards ceremonies? In the summer of 2020 the protesters in the streets of New York were disproportionately white millennials with advanced degrees m

The new knowledge economy created a new class of Americans: men and women with college degrees (at the very least), skilled with symbols and numbers, salaried professionals in information technology, scientific research, design, management consulting, the upper civil service, financial analysis, medicine, law, journalism, the arts, higher education