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Aug 1, 2024 | 
thebaffler.com | Kenneth Dillon
In the hours after President Joe Biden suspended his reelection campaign on July 21, both fans and critics of Vice President Kamala Harris rushed to characterize her as a Biden-style pragmatist. Vox’s Christian Paz called Harris a “pragmatic thinker,” whose lack of firm beliefs likely lost her the nod in 2020.
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Jun 11, 2024 | 
americaamerica.news | Kenneth Dillon
After a jury in Wilmington, Del., yesterday took just three hours to find Hunter Biden guilty on three counts involving his lying on a form about his drug addiction in order to buy a gun, his father President Joe Biden spoke honorably about his commitment to our judicial system and the rule of law. This despite his obvious misgivings about why these charges were brought.
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May 28, 2024 | 
lareviewofbooks.org | Kenneth Dillon
Kenneth Dillon reviews Becca Rothfeld’s “All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess.”All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess by Becca Rothfeld. Metropolitan Books. 304 pages.
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May 28, 2024 | 
clereviewofbooks.com | Kenneth Dillon
I recently saw The Wife of Willesden, the first play by the novelist Zadie Smith. As I walked through the Brooklyn Academy of Music, I noticed the stage had been transformed into a bar. Some members of the audience even seemed to be seated there to fill the suggested room. How did I miss this chance to participate? I wondered as I took my seat in the balcony. I should have noticed the people sitting at those low round wooden tables had been facing out all along.
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Mar 24, 2024 | 
nyra.nyc | Kenneth Dillon
Just after 10 p.m., Leila Taylor, the creative director of the Brooklyn Public Library, stepped onto a platform in the Central Library at 10 Grand Army Plaza and read a quote from the eccentric paper architect Étienne-Louis Boullée. In Architecture, Essay on Art, Boullée writes: “If there’s one project that should please an Architect, and at the same time, fire his genius, it is a Public Library.” Hushed cheers and soft claps filled the huge wing devoted to Languages & Literature.
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Oct 27, 2023 | 
noemamag.com | Kenneth Dillon
Credits Kenneth Dillon is a writer from New York. This summer, Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of the bestselling divorce memoir “Eat, Pray, Love,” posted an unusual video to Instagram. Gilbert’s warm smile has become familiar to more than a million followers, but in the video she looks sullen as she describes her forthcoming novel, “The Snow Forest,” in the past tense.
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Oct 11, 2023 | 
publicbooks.org | Kenneth Dillon |Megan Cummins
Julius Taranto may have left his job as a lawyer at Kellogg Hansen in January 2023, but as a full-time writer he remains fascinated by the court of public opinion. His debut novel, How I Won a Nobel Prize, explores The Rubin Institute, a fictional American university founded by an eccentric billionaire that welcomes pedophiles, racists, and other disgraced scholars fleeing cancellation.
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Oct 10, 2023 | 
publicbooks.org | Durba Mitra |Kenneth Dillon
Neferti Tadiar’s Remaindered Life (Duke University Press, 2022) is the feminist work for our global present, offering an indispensable framework for conceptualizing the lives of the people in “most of the world,” to use Partha Chatterjee’s phrase.
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Sep 11, 2023 | 
clereviewofbooks.com | Kenneth Dillon
One great trick any coercive organization—be it a fast food restaurant chain or the executive branch of the federal government—can play on an unassuming public is to purport to have a “face.” It’s the line cooks who drop newly hatched chicks into blenders, the Department of the Interior that sells the playground to Exxon; not, of course, the waxy figure on the television with no obviously functional facial muscles we nevertheless call “the King“ or “president.” Historians have long studied...
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Jun 22, 2023 | 
thebaffler.com | Kenneth Dillon
Central Park West: A Crime Novel by James Comey. Mysterious Press, 384 pages. 2023. “Downright smiley” James Comey is a crime novelist now. Few functionaries of state power have achieved as high a profile with as little personality as has the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, so it’s nearly impossible to guess what about the art of fiction would give the involuntary retiree the giggles.
