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Free Radical

An Interview With Noam Chomsky

Up until December 1967, almost everybody had been a hawk. Starting in February 1968, everybody who was not a dove was saying they had been all along. If you look at the Kennedy-era intellectuals, they have two versions of what happened: the memoirs they wrote before the Tet Offensive and the books they wrote after it. These are radically different. Before Tet, there is no hint that anyone wanted to withdraw from Vietnam. The books after Tet are full of explanations about how Kennedy had plans to withdraw from Vietnam. The game was over by then, of course, and they wanted to cover their asses.

I Read The News Today

I’m wary of men and women whose speeches are impassioned but who rarely listen; who know how to save the world but not their own neglected marriages. Rather than face the dark side of their consciousness, they exhort us to march behind them in the lengthening shadows, to live (and die) for their truth (or re-election).

The Danger Of Being Environmentally Correct

(Maybe There Is No Hundredth Monkey)

In effect, our sense of individual responsibility is enlisted by those making production decisions to craft a myth of universal responsibility. For if everyone contributes equally to the problem, then we can’t hold any specific institutions or people accountable for decisions that hurt the earth.

Friend Of The Sun

Sunbeams

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.

Ernest Hemingway

Twenty

The Sun tries to be different: a journal that lives at the margins of popular culture without making a religion out of it, that acknowledges our kinship with one another by what we don’t print as well as what we do.

Sally Mann’s Beautiful And Treacherous World

Only dead photographers receive the kind of attention Sally Mann’s been getting. When her exhibit of photographs, Immediate Family, opened at New York’s Houk-Friedman Gallery last year, Mann received reviews in the Wall Street Journal and the New Yorker.

Friend Of The Sun

Games People Play

Yet even the oppressed oppress one another — hoarding just a little, worrying more about their kids than those next door. The illusion of separateness is a game played by rich and poor alike: the game that I’m in here, you’re in there; that these bodies are separate nations.

Reopening The Wound

Reflections On Oliver Stone’s JFK

I’ve never been as strongly affected by a movie as I was by Oliver Stone’s JFK. Although Stone takes artistic liberties in weaving together the disturbing facts surrounding Kennedy’s assassination and its subsequent investigation, I found his central thesis — that Kennedy’s death was part of a well-orchestrated plot reaching into the highest levels of our government — not only plausible, but compelling.