Articles by Kathryn Schulz
Kathryn Schulz is author of the book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. Her freelance magazine work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, The Nation, Foreign Policy, and elsewhere. She was previously an editor at Grist.
All Articles
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Vision trouble
Democrats, environmentalists, and other left-leaning sorts are arguing heatedly over whether to move the party to the left or to the right in the wake of the election (those who aren't arguing over whether the election was legitimate, that is). One wag challenged those who disapprove of any rightward slide to ask themselves: "What states did John Kerry lose that Howard Dean would have won?"
I find this line of argument terrifying. If we have to make the left into the right in order to win, I don't want to win. The problem isn't Dean or Kerry. The problem is that the left has utterly, drastically failed to generate a broadly compelling discourse about America. We absolutely could do that -- could saturate the nation with a democratic (small d and large) vision of justice, fairness, hardwork, opportunity, creativity, exploration, unity, diversity, solidarity, and success. We could also expose the current far-right agenda for what it is really about: fear, control, cronyism, corruption, exploitation, homogeneity, and government and corporate control.
Instead, we're squirming around inside the narrowminded narrative of the right, trying to carve out some tiny, safe, identifiable space that is ours. It'll never happen. We can't beat them on their terms -- only when we begin to define the rules of the game.
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Kathryn Schulz reviews Monster of God by David Quammen
What this world needs," opined the nature writer David Quammen in a 1984 column for Outside magazine, "is a good vicious 60-foot-long Amazon snake." He was kidding, thankfully; the rest of the column goes on to describe the human tendency to massively exaggerate the size of anacondas in the Amazon. Now, though, 19 years later, Quammen has written Monster of God, a book arguing that precisely what the world does need is very large, very predatory animals.
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On Bjorn Lomborg's hidden agenda
Here is Denmark, that harmonious northern country known for its curiously vanilla accomplishments (comprehensive social welfare, pastry, Hans Christian Anderson), and here is its latest export, Bjorn Lomborg, come to announce the good news that we live in a fairy-tale world.
