More Articles...
Print
The Rail’s Person of the Year, 2005
by Theodore HammIn 1927, four years after its founding, Time Magazine launched its seminal “Man of the Year” award. In 2005, five years after its founding, The Brooklyn Rail is launching its own equally seminal “Person of the Year” award. We’re a year late, but in my view right on Time. Next year, though not this one, the honoree may even grace our cover.
Over the years, Time has honored various people of prominence, both deserved and dubious. The awards sometimes signified that the figures were the “newsmaker” of the year, and at other times, signified that they were friends of Time founder and publisher Henry Luce. The 30s, for example, saw tremendous range: Gandhi, FDR, Haile Selassie, Wallis Warfield Simpson (a.k.a the Duchess of Windsor), Madame and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek, Hitler, and Stalin. If you want to know more about Luce’ friends and enemies, read the great biographer W.A. Swanberg’s Luce and His Empire. For now, read on.
The Brooklyn Rail hereby makes Congressman John (or Jack) Murtha its inaugural “Person of the Year.” His courageous, altogether unexpected call for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq has suddenly, and finally, created real debate over how to end the Iraq war. Murtha, a venerable hawk, has opened the coop for the doves. Marines are always at the front lines of battle.
Whatever happens regarding the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq in 2006 will owe much to the position that Jack Murtha took at the end of 2005. For this we salute him, and I have a sneaking suspicion that in this sentiment, we’re not alone.
Peace on earth.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
A YEAR IN ART BOOKS
Negative Publicity: Artefacts of Extraordinary Rendition
by Benjamin Gottlieb
DEC 16-JAN 17 | Art Books
To mark the end of the year, the Rail’s Art Books editors, Ben Gottlieb, Phillip Griffith, and Greg Lindquist, and Managing Director Sara Christoph each selected a notable book from the past year to share with our readers. This is not a list of the best books of the year. Instead, it is an informal survey meant to highlight the diversity of art book publishing now.
New Year’s Eve & Day in the Anthropocene
by Craig Santos PerezMAR 2017 | Poetry
Craig Santos Perez is a native Chamorro from the Pacific Island of Guam. He is the author of three book, most recently from unincorporated territory [guma’], which received an American Book Award 2015. He is an associate professor in the English department at the University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa.
The End (of the Year) Justifies the Means: Best of 2016
by Marshall YarbroughNOV 2016 | Music
The past few years I’ve had to write one of these “year’s best” columns, the Rail has had some compelling angle on the concept that allowed me to push past my initial misgivings, some Poundian premise to “make it new” that let me forget I was engaged in an arbitrary enterprise. Since we’ve scrapped the high-concept approach this year, I’ve told myself that what I need to do is simply embrace the artificiality of the thing.
YEAR ZERO: 2017 Pingyao Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon International Film Festival
by Celluloid Liberation FrontFEB 2018 | Film
Unlike consumer democracies, authoritarian states do not afford their citizens the illusion of freedom. Everything occurring under their tutelage reflect, to varying degrees, their political intentions, limitations and concessions.
RSS