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Posts published by “Jonah Raskin”

Please, Not A Country For Old Men

I’m not entirely certain what a country for old white men would look and feel like, but I have been thinking about that image/concept ever since I first saw the movie, No Country for Old…

The N-Word: Still Troublesome After All These Years

The N-word appears sparingly in James, Percival Everett’s 2024 novel that reinvents the escaped slave narrative while it recycles Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a classic set in the antebellum American South where…

Imperialism: Conrad, Lenin And Heart Of Darkness

Imperialism was a loaded word, a most unsavory word, in academia in the U.S. in the 1960s when I wrote a Ph.D. thesis about Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad titled “The Mythology of Imperialism.” I…

Chicago: City of a Thousand Faces

“Chicken in the car and the car can’t go, that’s how you spell Chicago.” I heard that jingle when I was a boy and have never forgotten it. I’m writing this on the cusp of…

What’s In A Word: Weird?

Tim Walz, the Governor of Minnesota and Kamala Harris’s running mate, gave new meaning to an old word when he called Trump and Co, “weird.” Leave it to a high school teacher and a football…

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