American Politics | The Monthly

November 2012

Waiting on Nate's Numbers

By Nick Feik

If there's one person, besides Obama and Romney, who will always be associated with the 2012 US presidential elections, one person whose professional reputation is just as dependent on the result, one person whose numbers will be equally scrutinised, it's Nate Silver.Nate Silver is the statistician and polling analyst behind the fivethirtyeight blog at the New York Times. The blog runs a seri

The improbable president

Waiting for Barack

By Peter Conrad

I can remember the first Tuesday in November four years ago in detail, without needing to be prompted by my diary. It was a longer day than nature intended, with five extra hours. I had an early morning flight from London to New York, and a hire-car service I use at unsocial times collected me from my house before dawn to take me to the airport. The driver was a Caribbean man, cheerful despit

The 17th Biennale of Sydney

Artful Excess

By Juliana Engberg

The marketing material for the seventeenth Biennale of Sydney displays a lusty engagement with the semiotics of font. Using the agitprop colours of red, black and white, the über-cool British designers Barnbrook deliver a bastard mix of divine and dirty lettering, combining the styles of Deutsche-Gothic and Soviet modern with cosmological geometric diagrams.The graphic design being featured tells us a lot about the aesthetics and polit

From the Chrysalis

By Don Watson

FIRST PUBLISHED IN JUNE 2010. It was a bad night for neo-cons, neo-liberals and neo-Hobbesians, the last being those wiseacres in and around the now-crumbled Bush administration who had been inclined to justify the “muscular unilateralism” of recent American policy by reference to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. The neo-Hobbesians maintained that, being a g

Learning from America

Patriot Acts

By Waleed Aly

Hendi is the Muslim chaplain at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Despite the sober surrounds, he fizzes with energy and urgency. Certainly Hendi has his academic commitments - he teaches a class on inter-religious relations - but within him dwells the

Recent book subtitles

And You Can Too

By Gideon Haigh

The mass of books lead lives of quiet desperation. Compared to the dowdy shops of yesteryear, the modern bookstore is a place of gaiety, even exuberance. But with essentially three months to make their mark before returning from whence they came, under Austral