Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Fintan O’Toole

Fintan O’Toole is a columnist for The Irish Times and the Leonard L. Milberg Professor of Irish Letters at Princeton. His new book, We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland, will be published in the US in March.  (October 2021)

@fotoole

The Lie of Nation Building

From the very beginning, the problem with the US involvement in Afghanistan lay essentially in the deficits in American democracy.

The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

by Craig Whitlock

The American War in Afghanistan: A History

by Carter Malkasian

October 7, 2021 issue

A Younger Robert Penn Warren

September 23, 2021 issue

Freedom for Sale

In the 1950s and 1960s, a new generation of American artists began to think of advertising and commercial imagery as the new avant-garde.

The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War

by Louis Menand

July 22, 2021 issue

Letter

Walter L. Mosley

A Younger Robert Penn Warren

September 23, 2021 issue

Theater, Politics, and Critic

“The way the personal and the political overlap in certain public lives can be illuminating for both arenas.”

May 22, 2021

The King of Little England

Boris Johnson, unlike Trump, does not want never-ending disarray. The difficulty is that, having delivered him a string of political successes, Brexit will not go away.

June 10, 2021 issue

To Hell with Unity

Biden’s ability to govern depends on abandoning any hope of reconciliation with the GOP.

March 25, 2021 issue

The Trump Inheritance

Trumpism has always been here, it was waiting only to be named. What does this mean for the Biden presidency?

February 25, 2021 issue

Democracy’s Afterlife

Trump, the GOP, and the rise of zombie politics.

December 3, 2020 issue

William Barr: Enabler in Chief

The attorney general exemplifies the growing influence of right-wing Catholicism under Trump.

November 5, 2020 issue

A Moral Witness

Martha Gellhorn’s letters to her lovers and intimate friends involve a remarkable feat of reportage on the war within Gellhorn herself

Yours, for Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn’s Letters of Love and War, 1930–1949

edited by Janet Somerville

October 8, 2020 issue

Joe and Jill Biden watching fireworks during the Democratic National Convention, Wilmington, Delaware, August 20, 2020

Night and Day

Democrats are gambling that abhorrence of Trump is sufficiently strong to motivate voters, and Biden and Harris can offer comfort and empathy instead.

September 24, 2020 issue

Donald Trump walking past riot police in Lafayette Park during protests following the police killing of George Floyd, Washington, D.C., June 2020

Unpresidented

Toxic residues from the Civil War, the Vietnam War, and the so-called war on terror continue to flow into American politics.

July 23, 2020 issue

Vector in Chief

To understand Trump’s incoherence, we have to take into account two contradictory impulses within the right-wing mindset: paranoia and risk.

May 14, 2020 issue

Bernie Sanders; drawing by Anders Nilsen

The Outsider

In his presidential campaigns Bernie Sanders has radically altered the meaning of inside and outside.

April 9, 2020 issue

Trump’s Show Trial

Republican senators are now quite openly behaving as courtiers. It is impertinent for courtiers even to go through the motions of putting the monarch on trial.

February 27, 2020 issue

The Designated Mourner

Joe Biden is the most gothic figure in American politics. He is haunted by death, not just by the private tragedies his family has endured, but by a larger and more public sense of loss.

January 16, 2020 issue