Richard Beck @Richard__Beck Twitter profile

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Richard Beck

5 months

HOMELAND: THE WAR ON TERROR IN AMERICAN LIFE is now available for pre-order. It will be published on September 3.

Homeland by Richard Beck: 9780593240229 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

A groundbreaking history of how the decades-long war on terror changed virtually every aspect of American life, from the erosion of citizenship down to the cars we bought and TV we watched—by...

www.penguinrandomhouse.com

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

4 months

*This* is the fucking alternative to Trump?

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

11 months

No, I’m sorry, we’re not doing this idiocy again. If a politician fails to get elected because of his explicit and material support of a genocide, it is the politician’s fault. If you don’t like that Biden’s favorability ratings are dropping, take it up with Biden.

Mollie Katzen

@MollieKatzen

11 months

If "the left" sits out the 2024 election because they are mad that Biden isn't pure enough, they will help elect a Christo Fascist government that will waste no time turning this country into a Christian theocracy. So breathtakingly stupid, my teeth hurt.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

4 months

The extent to which US news orgs have decided that cops beating protesters is normal, and therefore not really worth reporting on, is very, very scary. Every one of these incidents should be front page news.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

2 months

How did the Biden dead-enders get so emotionally invested in this guy? I could understand feeling that way about a generational talent like Obama, but ... him?

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

11 months

"End apartheid, end the occupation" is the only response to what's unfolding that is both reality-based and moral. The selective, anguished humanitarianism that only floods my timeline when Palestinians fight back isn't going to cut it.

Saul Staniforth

@SaulStaniforth

11 months

"Gaza is a cage, is the biggest prison in the world. Nobody spoke about lifting the siege. People who live 70 years in a cage want to resist, and if they have the possibility they'll do it..." Israeli journalist Gideon Levy speaking on BBC News.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

2 months

Obscene to describe one's youthful opposition to Vietnam, one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century, as "naive."

Jeff (Gutenberg Parenthesis) Jarvis

@jeffjarvis

2 months

I am old enough to be having terrible flashbacks to 1968. I was a naive teenager among those who marched against Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam. Johnson had given us civil rights law but was hounded from the ticket, a tragic character. The result: the Chicago convention disaster,

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

11 months

What are we supposed to call this except a mass murder of some of the most oppressed people on earth? Every single one of the US politicians who is supporting Israel's war has revealed themselves as inadequate to the historical moment. I hope their actions haunt them forever.

TIMES OF GAZA

@Timesofgaza

11 months

Accompanied by a total blackout of telecommunication services, lsraeli warplanes launch the most violent series of air attacks against Gaza Strip.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

2 months

Biden has no intention of keeping any of the promises he’s been making over the past week. This is nothing more than an attempt to bury the effort to kick him off the ticket under a flurry of policy proposals.

Kyle Griffin

@kylegriffin1

2 months

BREAKING WAPO: President Biden is finalizing plans to endorse major changes to the Supreme Court in the coming weeks — including proposals for legislation to establish term limits for the justices and an enforceable ethics code, according to two people briefed on the plans.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

6 months

"Children are being starved at the fastest rate the world has ever seen."

Medical Aid for Palestinians

@MedicalAidPal

6 months

"This is the fastest decline in a population's nutrition status ever recorded. That means children are being starved at the fastest rate the world has ever seen." @melanie_ward speaks with @IsaCNN about the catastrophic levels of hunger that Israel's blockade is causing in Gaza

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

11 months

Facing down death with dignity and solidarity. Unbelievable bravery.

Sameh Habeeb

@Samehahabeeb

11 months

Gaza residents organise dozens of protests refusing to evacuate chanting “we prefer to die and not to be humiliated” #Gaza

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

8 months

I’m seeing a little resurgence of 90s-style “dang the Middle East is just too complicated for anyone to ever solve its problems” rhetoric on here lately, and it is just as tiresome now as it was back then.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

2 months

Maybe president-worship is just a default reflex for a lot of people now.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

2 months

Biden can't string two thoughts together, liberals are defending genocide, the Supreme Court just gutted the federal government's administrative capacity, and we're sacrificing the climate just to make sure that China doesn't "win"—the US is not coming back from 2024.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

2 months

All the Dem rhetoric about "saving democracy" over the past eight years has just been bullshit. Bunch of mediocre careerists who don't see what they do as anything more than a competitive scramble for professional status.

Tax unrealized capital gains at 100%

@lib_crusher

2 months

Oh FUCK YOU

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

10 months

When concern-trolling pieces like this tell you the left is "fracturing" despite all available evidence suggesting otherwise, what they mean is that the part of the left they're comfortable with is no longer in the driver's seat.

Israel, Gaza, and the Fracturing of the Intellectual Left

“A segment of the left’s moral compass seems to have broken.”

nymag.com

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

6 months

OK now it feels real: My book has a cover. HOMELAND: THE WAR ON TERROR IN AMERICAN LIFE will be published on September 3, 2024. It's the product of a decade's work, and I'm excited to share it with all of you.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

10 months

Chotiner doing a real service with his interviews since the start of the war given the politics of his average reader.

Isaac Chotiner

@IChotiner

10 months

New Interview: I talked to Daniella Weiss, a West Bank settler and activist, about how her religious views shape her view of the conflict, why she thinks human rights should not be considered universal, and her movement’s extreme plans for the region.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

2 months

On the other hand, this is a clarifying post. The assertion, "Maturity is realizing that we need to be able to kill people abroad with impunity or else our domestic politics spiral into chaos" tells you something about the foundations of US domestic politics.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

10 months

Whatever else happens over the next year, liberal Zionism is dead as a position that deserves serious consideration.

David Klion

@DavidKlion

10 months

Read @IChotiner ’s latest for a refreshingly blunt look at the ideology governing Israel from someone who feels no need to euphemize anything for sensitive Western liberals. The liberal Zionist delusion is that you can support Israel without supporting this

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

7 months

Israel forced a Palestinian detainee to go into a hospital to tell people to evacuate, and then killed him when he left. The sadism and barbarism of the IDF is almost beyond words. No one should ever forgive Biden for supporting this atrocity campaign.

IDF Sent in Handcuffed Prisoner to Evacuate Hospital, Then Killed Him When He Left

Israel sent a handcuffed Palestinian prisoner into Gaza’s Nasser Hospital to order an evacuation, then killed him when he left.

theintercept.com

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

5 months

That Netanyahu is releasing a video statement about this suggests that 1) he and the US government think this latest bit of hysterical propaganda might have some real legs, and 2) the speed and magnitude of the student mobilization has them worried.

Sulaiman Ahmed

@ShaykhSulaiman

5 months

BREAKING: NETANYAHU OFFICIAL STATEMENT ON UNIVERSITY PROTESTS "What's happening in America's college campuses is horrific. Antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities. They call for the annihilation of Israel. They attack Jewish students, and they attack Jewish

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

9 months

This is very dark, but the fact that Congress has to pass a resolution saying that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are the same thing means that people's efforts to end the conflation of the two are getting somewhere.

Ryan Grim

@ryangrim

9 months

A new House resolution, which may be voted on as early as tonight, "clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is antisemitism." This comes after a previous resolution hinted at that claim, but did not fully state it. So now Congress wants to leave no question. But there's an

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

10 months

Sorry but how the hell would you know?

Joyce Carol Oates

@JoyceCarolOates

10 months

"their struggle is our struggle." doubt that this identification is reciprocal.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

2 months

Lol our standards for a president's ability to speak extemporaneously and demonstrate basic historical knowledge have just plummeted. Twenty years ago there was a Democratic party consensus that this guy was obviously an idiot and an embarrassment to the country!

André Béliveau

@TheRealBeliveau

2 months

Absolute legend. 🐐

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

11 months

This is what I mean about "reality-based." The destruction of the state of Israel is not even remotely an actual possibility. Meanwhile, on planet Earth, there is only one path toward ending the violence, and that is ending the occupation and apartheid.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

11 months

The way you know this "commitment" isn't real is that Biden didn't try to do anything for Palestinian self-determination during the first 3 years of his administration. Instead, he decided to keep rolling with a Middle East strategy cooked up by Jared fucking Kushner.

President Biden

@POTUS

11 months

The United States remains committed to the Palestinian people’s right to dignity and to self-determination. The actions of Hamas terrorists don’t take that right away.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

5 days

HOMELAND is out today. Buy it, read it, tell your friends. I'm thrilled to finally have it out in the world.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

5 years

Eli Valley feels like one of the only artists currently working who has figured out what to do with the anger and fear that most people I know feel on a daily basis. Really grateful for his work.

Eli Valley

@elivalley

5 years

After seeing the images that came out this week, here's a new drawing.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

11 months

I think it's useful to be a little more specific here. Americans aren't just nostalgic for the "moral clarity" of 9/12. They're nostalgic for a situation where they felt they had sanction to seek vengeance through unlimited violence.

Erik Baker

@erikmbaker

11 months

Something very sad and disturbing that I didn't quite appreciate is how many Americans are actively nostalgic for the moral clarity they feel they experienced in the immediate aftermath of 9/11

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

5 months

New Atheism was always primarily about hatred of Islam specifically—could never have taken off without 9/11 and the war on terror—so I don't think Dawkins is actually being inconsistent here.

Murtaza Hussain

@MazMHussain

5 months

Dawkins spent his whole life taking part in a ruthless culture war against Christianity and now belatedly realizes that he didn’t understand what he was doing and wants to take some essential part back. Doesn’t work that way unfortunately.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

1 year

Manuscript submitted. 165k words, 533 pages, two and a half years of writing and research, and almost a decade of reading and thinking. I’ve never worked so hard on anything in my life, and I can’t wait for all of you to read it.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

5 months

Can’t stop thinking about how much more these students will know about the world they live in when they graduate than I did back in 2009. Inspiring.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

11 months

It's hard to get my head around the fact that the whole American government is united around making atrocities like this possible. Nobody calling for a ceasefire, fucking NBA teams chiming in to let us know they approve—just a disgusting failure of political imagination.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

11 months

@MyDogMonkey This associate professor of genocide and Holocaust studies, who is also an endowed professor in the study of modern genocide, says it's "a textbook case of genocide."

A Textbook Case of Genocide

Israel has been explicit about what it’s carrying out in Gaza. Why isn’t the world listening?

jewishcurrents.org

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

11 months

Like, this kind of thing is worse than beside the point. Ok, sure, I'm not "defending" the tactic. That doesn't change the fact that this how people fight when they're at an overwhelming military disadvantage. You want it to stop? End the occupation.

Zack Beauchamp

@zackbeauchamp

11 months

Whatever one's position on the broader conflict, no one can or should defend this kind of terrorism as a legitimate tactic of war. It's vicious.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

5 years

Don't see how it could be possible to overreact to this.

MSNBC

@MSNBC

5 years

Thousands of immigrants forced into solitary confinement by ICE for being physically disabled or gay.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

4 years

@333333333433333 At my first confession when I was eight years old, I was so nervous that I couldn't come up with any actual sins to confess, so I lied and said I had stolen a bicycle.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

23 days

Honestly kind of overwhelming to hold a real copy of HOMELAND for the first time.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

4 months

Americans have lots of experience metabolizing atrocities committed by their government, but I truly think that the public opinion shift we've seen over the past seven months is going to be permanent.

New Left Review

@NewLeftReview

4 months

'If Iraq marked the point at which American hegemony changed into domination, then perhaps Gaza marks the point at which Americans finally realized it.' Richard Beck ( @Richard__Beck ) on the contradictions of Bidenism Abroad:

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

10 months

I don't ever want to hear about the principles underlying "humanitarian interventions" again. If the US cared about those principles *at all*, Congress would be debating whether to send the army to topple Israel's government.

Jennine

@lilearthquakess

10 months

🚨🚨🚨🚨 The cholera outbreak in Gaza, due to consumption of contaminated water, is killing the afflicted through severe dehydration and kidney failure, as a result of massive fluid and electrolyte losses in the form of watery diarrhea and vomiting

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

4 years

I'm writing my second book! My history of how the War on Terror changed life in the United States will be published by Crown. I'm grateful for my agent, Jim Rutman, and I'm excited to be working with my new editor, @kevindoughten , over the next few years.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

8 months

Good rundown of the many, many problems with the NYT's October 7 mass rape story, which increasingly looks Judith Miller–level bad.

NYT’s Disgraceful “Investigation”: Weaponizing Sexual Violence Against Women for Occupation...

Following the allegations of rape cases on October 7, and 80 days of subsequent developments, The New York Times released an "investigative report" on December 28, 2023. This report, allegedly...

speakupeg.com

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

12 days

Stunning, authoritative critique by @CharlotteERosen of "Tablets Shattered," a book that primarily succeeds in documenting its own author's absolute and infantile refusal to see what's right in front of him.

Acting Jewishly During a Genocide – Spectre Journal

Charlotte Rosen considers Joshua Leifer's new book, which appears more likely to presage the author's turn to Jewish conservatism than to be embraced by anyone on the left.

spectrejournal.com

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

26 days

HOMELAND is out three weeks from today (😱), and some advance praise has started to come in (😎). Thank you, thank you, *thank you* to Andrew Bacevich, Pankaj Mishra, Isabella Hammad, and @GregGrandin for taking the time to read it.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

3 years

I wrote about one of my heroes for @nplusonemag .

On Janet Malcolm

When I read In the Freud Archives for the first time, I understood myself to be looking for facts, dates, quotations—material. The material was there, and like a good nonfiction writer I dutifully...

www.nplusonemag.com

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

18 days

Obama's oratorical gifts ring so hollow now because his fundamental theory of US politics—that the racial contradictions at the heart of American history could be overcome by ignoring them—has turned out to be completely wrong.

David Marcus

@davidimarcus

18 days

Listening to Obama’s speech—beautifully wrought, laden with parallel structures and images of imagined Americans, and with absolutely no policy substance—really brings to home how flat it all sounds today and how far we are from 2008

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

5 years

I am so tired of having a death cult for a government.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

10 months

The idea that anyone would say anything to a halal cart guy other than "Thank you from the bottom of my undeserving heart for hanging out in a little metal box all day so I can enjoy some of the greatest cheap food on earth" is insane. Like what the fuck is wrong with people?

Zara Magnusson

@zaramagnusson

10 months

Meet Stuart Seldowitz, a former advisor to the White House who used to advise Obama on foreign policy. He is a three-time winner of the State Department’s Superior Honour Award.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

4 months

New piece from me: an evaluation of the Biden administration's foreign policy (including but not limited to Israel and Gaza) for @NewLeftReview .

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

2 months

If he actually intended to do anything about the Supreme Court he would have done it back when many members of his party were mobilized and pleading with him to do so.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

4 months

Jesus christ

alotta fagina

@nypdSMD

4 months

The fourth estate everyone

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

5 months

In other news, HOMELAND galleys have now arrived. If you are interested in reviewing the book for any publication, no matter how small (looking at you, college newspapers), send me a DM. Out September 3.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

2 months

Credibility is real and important, and Biden doesn’t have any left. He could promise an all-out effort to pass Medicare for All tomorrow morning and the correct response would still be, “Retire, bitch.”

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

11 months

I've thought for a while now that the heightened moralism of our political discourse is partially a symptom of people's belief that change is impossible.

Max Fox

@mxwfx

11 months

I think this clarifies some of my disinterest in the live moral evaluation discourse we’re seeing on here. The operative question actually seems to be: do you believe the situation can change?

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

10 months

Now I know how America looked to the rest of the world in 2002 and 2003.

alex lei

@alexL_E_I

10 months

“doing yoga for the hostages” sounds like something Conner O’Malley would blurt out while bleeding on the side of a bridge

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

6 months

I wrote about Waco, one of the dumbest disasters in US history, for @LRB .

London Review of Books

@LRB

6 months

‘The FBI negotiations were always going to fail. Koresh was never coming out. Why would he? At Mount Carmel he had built a world in which he had absolute sexual authority and everyone thought he was a prophet.’ @Richard__Beck on the Waco siege:

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

1 month

The rare essay that obviously should be expanded into a book. Very excited for this.

Kiara Barrow

@kfzbarrow

1 month

really thrilled that pankaj mishra is expanding on his brilliant LRB essay, "The Shoah After Gaza," with @penguinpress

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

17 days

In some parts of the world you can't even try and have casual sex without the US being like "Just a reminder that we can bomb you to ash at a moment's notice 😎💣💋."

Séamus Malekafzali

@Seamus_Malek

17 days

Opened Tinder in Lebanon. Was greeted by an ad from CENTCOM saying in Arabic, "Do not take arms against the US and its partners", that F-16s and A-10s are already prepared, and that the US will "protect its partners in the face of threats from the Iranian regime and its agents."

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

6 months

Appreciate Kushner's insistence that what Glazer said was both simple and obviously correct. There's no "debate" to be had about what Israel is doing in Gaza. You either support the war criminals or you oppose them. Clearest "which side are you on" moment in my lifetime so far.

Variety

@Variety

6 months

Tony Kushner says Jonathan Glazer made an “unimpeachable, irrefutable statement" about the Israel-Hamas war in his Oscar speech. "What he’s saying is so simple. He’s saying: Jewishness, Jewish identity, Jewish history, the history of the Holocaust, the history of Jewish

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

2 months

HOMELAND got a starred review from @PublishersWkly . Thank you so much, anonymous Publishers Weekly reviewer, for thinking I have "exhilaratingly fresh" takes.

Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life by Richard Beck

The racism, anxiety, tolerance for violence, and government unaccountability normalized by the “war on terror” led to the populi...

www.publishersweekly.com

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

1 month

Israel wants a regional war so bad, and the US seems more than happy to let them start it.

dylan saba

@shaabiranks

1 month

Due to its belligerence, Israel is now owed military responses from Yemen, Hezbollah, and Iran. When they come, especially if they are in conjunction with one another, the goldfish-brained US media will immediately frame Israel as a helpless victim of Muslim aggression

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

4 months

This administration statement they’re reading out on the radio right now is absolutely obscene.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

2 months

The contempt the Biden administration has for voters is pretty amazing!

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

24 days

My favorite memory of school is when they dressed all of us kindergartners up as Monarchs and took us on a bus to another school to teach us about migration. Now I’m 37 and they’ll be extinct soon.

Lyle Lewis

@Race2Extinct

25 days

This is a fairly typical graph of a species population decline that is flirting dangerously with extinction. They cling precariously to existence for a period of time before either an anthropogenic or natural event results in their disappearance.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

2 months

Look I don’t know what the required page count is but if you are a writer and want to write anything worthwhile you have to be reading a lot. Needs to be a central part of your life. Books, not the internet. No shortcuts!

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

11 months

I live a 10-minute walk from here, and all the time I see NYPD vehicles driving with an almost performative disregard for pedestrian safety, flipping on their sirens and crossing double-lines when they don’t feel like waiting in traffic. Just horrific.

Liam Quigley

@_elkue

11 months

A child, 7, was killed in Ft Greene earlier by an NYPD tow truck driver on N Portland Ave. The anger from the community is palpable, many on the sidewalk shouting at police on scene

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

8 months

@BigMeanInternet @chebhocine I think there’s a pretty persistent liberal belief that leftists don’t really mean it. Surprise!

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

12 days

HOMELAND is out Tuesday, September 3—one week from today. If you know you want to read the book and haven't preordered it yet ... do it!!!

Homeland by Richard Beck: 9780593240229 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

A groundbreaking history of how the decades-long war on terror changed virtually every aspect of American life, from the erosion of citizenship down to the cars we bought and TV we watched—by...

www.penguinrandomhouse.com

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

2 months

Sorry I don't buy it, at least not in the US.

Benjamin Teitelbaum

@BenTeitel

2 months

The right (the populist right in particular) understands the left so much better than vice versa. I've thought that for a long time, but it seems most obvious today.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

10 months

"Do not be defeated by the Feeling that there is too much for you to know. That is a myth of the oppressor. You are Capable of understanding life. And it is yours alone. And only this time." —Kenneth Koch, "Some General Instructions"

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

10 months

I don’t know whether this has any use politically, but it seems important to me to remember that at some level, those supporting the ongoing massacre in Gaza *are* ashamed of themselves.

Ben Ehrenreich

@BenEhrenreich

10 months

The level of McCarthyite rancor and repression is proportionate to the magnitude of the crimes they are covering for. They know how bad this is.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

3 years

Annual reminder that Spotify sucks and the less you use it the better your relationship with music will be.

I Am Here to Demonize Spotify

For a while in the 2010s, music critics were obsessed with “hauntology,” the return of dead and disappeared genres to contemporary music in ghostly form. Hauntology was not just nostalgia, the idea...

www.nplusonemag.com

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

17 days

Mark your calendars! HOMELAND will launch on Monday, September 9 at @McNallyJackson 's Seaport location. I'll be in conversation with world-famous Pennsylvania state senator (and my beloved former editor) @NikilSaval .

Richard Beck and Nikil Saval in conversation

On Monday, September 9, join n+1 senior writer Richard Beck in conversation with former n+1 coeditor Nikil Saval at McNally Jackson’s South Street Seaport location in Manhattan.

www.nplusonemag.com

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

4 months

It is obvious that the strategy is the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. I wish people would stop deluding themselves into believing that wars carried out for monstrous but coherent reasons are just "blunders."

Laura Rozen

@lrozen

4 months

as someone said yesterday, this is what it looks like when a country’s military operations are dictated 100% by politics, no strategy.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

10 months

This report says that Americans are now doing "hyper-consumption" and *planning* to overspend during the holidays, with half of consumers intending to take on extra debt. Makes sense to me. America shops to self-soothe, and life in the US is getting worse in lots of ways.

CNBC

@CNBC

10 months

60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck heading into the holidays, report finds

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

11 months

One thing I hope for myself is that I never become a person who writes, speaks, or even thinks the words, “I want to see the mass graves.”

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

10 months

You could just crib @GregGrandin and call it "The End of the Myth." Past decade has not been kind to lots of people's fantasies about how the world works, and the next several decades aren't going to be any kinder.

Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

10 months

do we have a name for the relentlessly shitty period of history we're going through yet?

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

1 year

Sorry, you're saying that in order to edit my book manuscript I have to read it again? Come face to face with my overuse of em-dashes and the word "specifically"?? For 500+ pages??? Doesn't seem fair.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

10 months

The US left is breaking with Bernie (decisively, I think) because over the past several weeks it has learned how to be internationalist for the first time in decades. This was a crucial step, and Bernie, always laser-focused on the domestic, was never going to be able to keep up.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

2 months

Shame on every single member of Congress who applauded this cynical butcher.

Quds News Network

@QudsNen

2 months

Members of the US Congress gave 53 standing ovations to Benjamin Netanyahu during his speech, which accounted for about half of the speech's duration.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

4 years

Sorry to be all "please share" but if you are still getting the "status not available" message on the IRS stimulus check website, enter your address in ALL CAPS. Just worked for me after three weeks of no success. Apparently the IRS website can't read lowercase letters. Fun!

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

4 years

Reposting once for the new week: I have some music writing up at @nplusonemag —a denunciation of Spotify plus short pieces on some of the music I encountered once I stopped relying on Spotify's brainless algorithms.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

1 month

Arno Mayer’s “Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?” is so illuminating on this. Antisemitism and anticommunism aren’t the same thing, but the overlap is extensive. Just one reason that the “antisemitism of the left” rhetoric is so cynical/dishonest.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

2 months

@_TimBarker Yeah I try not to be someone who sees signs of the end of US hegemony in every little thing, but at a certain point you gotta be honest and say, "Hm, that really is a lot of signs."

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

6 months

This is why describing what Aaron Bushnell did as "suicide" is inadequate. "Suicide" is when you end your life because you cannot imagine the possibility of its meaning anything. Bushnell ended his life because he knew it meant everything.

Max Granger

@_maxgranger

6 months

Levi Pierpont, a friend of Aaron Bushnell who met him at basic training and went on to become a conscientious objector.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

5 months

Outrageous repression couched in the vacuous university administrator vocabulary of student safety.

jon ben-menachem

@jbenmenachem

5 months

Minouche Shafik just announced her decision to request NYPD to clear out the pro-Palestine student encampment

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

4 years

A couple months into quarantine, and before the protests started, I tried to get my writing brain to work again by writing some music reviews, which were published today.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

4 months

Airport carpeting really sets off the cover design nicely.

Jamie Lauren Keiles

@jamiekeiles

4 months

suitable place to start the new @Richard__Beck

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

2 years

Journalists signing their names to an open letter is “bullying” and “anathema to a free society.” Sullivan has been the biggest hysteric in punditry for more than two decades now.

Andrew Sullivan

@sullydish

2 years

Journalistic mobs openly, publicly bullying named, fellow journalists. Now imagine the bullying they perpetrate *within* these institutions. They are, quite simply, anathema to a free society and a free press.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

5 years

I wrote about David Berman, country music, and trying to get by.

Let’s Not Kid Ourselves

Much of what David Berman wrote and performed throughout his life was country music: songs about the sadness and difficulty of trying to get by in the world, along with descriptions of that world....

www.nplusonemag.com

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

3 months

Slowing global growth causes wages to stagnate and swells the ranks of the global surplus population, spurring political instability in the global south and increased migration to the global north, giving racist right-wing politicians an issue around which to agitate. Happy?

Will Stancil

@whstancil

3 months

lefties get extremely angry when you suggest the massive worldwide surge in far-right politics might not have its roots in material conditions, but they can’t actually name a material condition that is occurring in all the places seeing a far-right surge

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

8 months

If that’s your view, keep it to yourself!

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

3 months

Brett Christophers makes the point in THE PRICE IS WRONG that it's insane to report on renewable energy growth in terms of added capacity each year. The only thing that actually matters—and where we are falling further behind—is what *percentage* of our energy is clean.

Benjamin Kunkel

@kunktation

3 months

‘“Clean energy is still not even meeting the entirety of demand growth. Arguably, the energy transition has not even started.”’

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

4 months

Thank you! Everyone else: We've still got galleys. Send me a DM w/ your address if you'd like one.

Paul Renfro

@paulmrenfro

4 months

Congrats, ⁦ @Richard__Beck ⁩! Looking forward to reading this.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

2 months

And obviously Bush was both of those things! It's just nuts to hear people today yell "best president of my lifetime" about a guy who can't make it through a sentence that has three independent clauses in it.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

4 days

Man if they take down the Internet Archive I'm gonna have to do some serious revision work on my book's endnotes. Invaluable part of my research. This sucks.

Publishers Weekly

@PublishersWkly

4 days

BREAKING: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the long-running, closely watched copyright case over the scanning and lending of print library books. Full story to follow.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

2 months

Doing this for the first time: If you would like *my* read on what led us to this horrible situation, I have a book coming out in September.

Homeland by Richard Beck: 9780593240229 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

A groundbreaking history of how the decades-long war on terror changed virtually every aspect of American life, from the erosion of citizenship down to the cars we bought and TV we watched—by...

www.penguinrandomhouse.com

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

2 months

The liberal Supreme Court justice’s dissent, like the big social novel or rock and roll, is a zombified genre that persists despite having long lost the ability to illuminate the contours of the world in which we now live.

Laleh Khalili 🇵🇸

@LalehKhalili

2 months

I was wondering why the Sotomayor dissent didn't sit well with me, and it is because the US president already uses Seal Team 6 to assassinate people with immunity and impunity. It is just that the victims now are black and brown people far away.

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Richard Beck

@Richard__Beck

16 days

Great piece. I discovered Arno Mayer's work back during the 2020 lockdown, and in some ways it gave me the final push I needed to figure out what my politics actually were. I don't think I actually cite him in my book, but he's hovering in the background of the whole thing.

Mathias

@bucephalus424

17 days

I wrote about the work of the great historian Arno J. Mayer and the relevance of his thought for understanding our current moment of crisis

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