Jesse Walker
reason
Baltimore, MD, United States
Contact Jesse
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Past articles by Jesse:
How Third Parties Die: Lessons for the Libertarian Party
This is what it looks like when a political party's branches start to go their own way. → Read More
The Covert War on Christmas
Friday A/V Club: That time Orson Welles tried to assassinate St. Nick. → Read More
It's Way Past Time To Release the Rest of the JFK Assassination Files
President Joe Biden just declassified another batch, but the government is still keeping some under wraps. → Read More
New 'Sight and Sound' Movie Lists Honor 'Jeanne Dielman' and '2001,' Snub TikTok
Sight and Sound magazine has again issued two lists of the allegedly greatest films ever made—one lineup based on a poll of critics, the other on a poll of directors. → Read More
Brits Battle Bureaucrats: Anti-Authoritarian Movies From Postwar Britain
Friday A/V Club: Two anti-authoritarian movies from postwar Britain. → Read More
Review: Russians Hack Dreams in Antero Alli's 'Tracer' Movie
In this science-fiction scenario, a designer drug allows Russian agents to actually enter users' dreams. The Russian mafia has gotten its hands on the technology. → Read More
How Stalin Toyed With Mikhail Bulgakov
The author of 'The Master and Margarita' faced a bewildering mixture of rewards and censorship from Stalin. → Read More
The Decline and Fall of the Oath Keepers
On January 13, 2022, the FBI arrested Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes for his alleged role in last year's riot... → Read More
When Ted Kennedy Was Pro-Life and Ronald Reagan Was Expanding Abortion Access
Forget Mars: If you want to visit an alien landscape, check out the reproductive politics of the 1960s and '70s.... → Read More
A Future for Floating Homes
Dutch officials are updating zoning laws to allow homes that are fixed to the shore but rise and fall with the water. → Read More
Are We Always on the Verge of Civil War?
All that Civil War II talk is overblown—but that isn't the only sort of political violence to worry about. → Read More
It's the End of the Neoliberal Era, and We Still Don't Know What Neoliberalism Is
Politics is filled with words that mean different things in different mouths, but "neoliberalism" is an especially tangled case. → Read More
Dangerous Visions and New Worlds
An anthology looks back at science fiction's New Wave → Read More
Red Markets
Sometimes communist countries had to tolerate a little economic liberty just to survive. → Read More
The Best of Cold War Culture
Books, films, and more related to the dissolution of the Soviet Union → Read More
The Hidden History of the Trillion Dollar Coin
Friday A/V Club: In 1992, it was a paramilitary America Firster who wanted to #MintTheCoin. → Read More
Walking the Delicate Line Between Reporter and Activist
Telling a century's worth of stories about the people who had done creative things on the radio dial—and their opponents → Read More
Governments Love a Media Cartel—As Long as They're in Control
Friday A/V Club: Some people are against concentrated media power. Some just want to bend it to their will. → Read More
Postal Censorship and Surveillance: A Timeline
The government's long and shameful history of intercepting people's letters → Read More
Now Everybody— – R
Thomas Pynchon's reputation as a "difficult" writer may be exaggerated—some of his shorter fictions are pretty accessible—but it isn't exactly undeserved. Books like V. and Gravity's Rainbow are rich, encyclopedic, and frequently funny works of anti-authoritarian literature, but they're also dense, complex, experimental, at times deliberately confusing, and prone to extended tangents. Pynchon's… → Read More