Dominic Green

5 days ago | washingtonexaminer.com | Dominic Green

If you know who Lenny Bruce is, you’re old. You’re either a boomer or a member of the cohort that is now blamed for blowing it in the ’60s, despite the warning from Peter Fonda’s character in Easy Rider. Or you’re one of their children, a Gen Xer who resents the parental grip on family assets and public office while sharing your parents’ reverence for the ’60s.

6 days ago | firstthings.com | Dominic Green

Mood Machine:The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfectby liz pellyatria/one signal, 288 pages, $28.99The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.” This statement, which is everywhere online, is attributed to Hunter S. Thompson. But Thompson’s original subject was the TV business, not the music business. No one knows who changed it.

1 week ago | wsj.com | Dominic Green

Not all his essays endure, but he had an exceptional talent for exposing political lies. When George Orwell died in 1950, he was known in England as a middling, somewhat old-fashioned novelist and a left-wing columnist and essayist. He was known in America for his final novels, “Animal Farm” and “1984,” but he’d never visited the U.S. He knew little about it beyond the fiction of Jack London and the legend of Abraham Lincoln’s log cabin, and he disliked America as vulgar and capitalistic.

1 week ago | wsj.com | Dominic Green

The Belgian ruler Leopold II had elaborate plans to extract resources from Africa. Pachyderms played a part. In 1876 Leopold II of Belgium decided to reinvent his small country as an imperial power. The vehicle for Belgium’s entry into the Scramble for Africa was the International African Association. The organization’s name suggested a charitable purpose, but Leopold instead went on to establish the Congo Free State, a private empire of slavery and cruelty.

1 week ago | washingtonexaminer.com | Dominic Green

They did it again. It happens every year. My invitation to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner got lost in the mail. However, this year, I was not the only one to avoid the penguin suit and the rubber chicken. Every president since Calvin Coolidge has attended the dinner at least once. So far, President Donald Trump has yet to make an appearance as president.