“Relax,” I told my friends, one evening after Donald Trump emerged as the Republican nominee for the presidency. “Make popcorn, then sit back and enjoy the collapse of the Republican party.” “How could we have been so wrong?” many of us have been asking ever since. The simplest answer is that we . . .
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I was: I had bought the rhetoric that said Hillary Clinton would win, that she would have all the electoral votes in addition to the popular vote, that we could not possibly elect someone who grabbed women’s vaginas without their permission and was appealing to racists and homophobes at every turn. Women . . .
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I flew back to Nebraska from Germany on the morning after the elections, with the final result slowly and painfully becoming evident, overwhelmed by a feeling I’d never felt before. A feeling similar to gloom, or dread, or even complete despair. I’ve felt all of these before, of course, but always about . . .
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Went to the bar down the street for cappuccino this morning. It’s been three days now since the US election. NB: this is Rome, my home, where cappuccino takes only seconds to make and is generally pretty good. I sit at a table outside, daring it to rain. After a few minutes . . .
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On November 9th, the 78th anniversary of Kristallnacht, that fateful date in German and German Jewish history, I called my sister-in-law Renate in Cleveland to wish her a happy birthday; it was of course my late wife Anne Halley’s birthday as well, since they were twins. Renate is a retired physician, head . . .
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I want to share what happened to me two days after the election, around 3:20 p.m. in the library café, a place where a lot of students, faculty, and staff hang out. I was having a conversation with a friend and colleague; the two of us were sitting at one of the . . .
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At first I thought there was something weirdly conflicting, even contradictory, in my two modes of response. On the one hand, I wept with my students and held out to them the value of what we do in the classroom: coming together to read, to think, to talk, to take each other . . .
Read MoreEditor’s Note: MR inaugurates here a new blog series, “Our America.” The editorial that follows is one voice among countless others, and the first of many in this series. We look forward to hearing from our friends and contributors. It’s as much about the Electoral College as it is about never having graduated . . .
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Cain, bronze sculpture by Lois Anvidalfarei I use a simple screen to judge whether a political program—and the behavior which follows—is progressive. Two sides of one coin: for a political program to be progressive requires people to behave progressively. For me, the Urugrayan ex-President Pepe Mujica and the mayors of Barcellona and . . .
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Though I’ve been at it for a few years now, editing this magazine still is full of surprises, and nearly all are pleasant. Finding new work you really love, and getting to correspond with—or even meet in person—the writer of that work is, of course, best of all. At the annual AWP . . .
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