For a moment, he was obscured by the Havana night. It was as if he were invisible, as he had been before coming to Cuba, in the midst of revolution. Then a burst of floodlights illuminated him: William Alexander Morgan, the great Yankee comandante. He was standing, with his back against a bullet-pocked wall, in an empty moat surrounding La Cabaña—an eighteenth-century stone fortress, on a cliff overlooking Havana Harbor, that had been converted into a prison. Flecks of blood were drying on the patch of ground where Morgan’s friend had been shot, moments earlier. Morgan, who was thirty-two, blinked into the lights. He faced a firing squad.The gunmen gazed at the man they had been ordered to kill. Morgan was nearly six feet tall, ... Continue reading →

When the novelist Jennifer Egan submitted her latest short story to The New Yorker, she hinted to Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor, that there was a catch. It soon became evident: Ms. Egan had written an entire work of fiction in 140 character bits, to be first posted on Twitter and then published in the magazine.“I had a sense it could work for a spy story,” Ms. Egan said this week while sitting in Ms. Treisman’s office.Ms. Treisman was receptive to the idea, so much so that this week the New Yorker will begin publishing the story, “Black Box,” in segments on Twitter. Starting Thursday night, the New Yorker’s Twitter fiction handle, @NYerFiction, will post a new tweet of text from Ms. Egan’s 8,500 word ... Continue reading →

April 30, 2012 Dear readers and friends of the Prospect, The American Prospect needs your urgent help. We’ve launched a campaign that is, quite literally, do or die. I hope you will contribute to help Save the Prospect. Last fall we expanded our reporting, improved the web site, and invested in broadening our reach through social media. We made these investments because the times were demanding it—the need for what the Prospect does has never been greater. In many important ways that expansion has paid off. Through the site, the print and digital editions of the Prospect magazine, the work of our social media team and the appearances of our writers, editors and stories on TV and radio, the Prospect has increased its impact and ... Continue reading →

In response to a request from Nick James, the editor of the great British film journal Sight & Sound, to submit a ballot for their poll regarding the “Ten Greatest Films of All Time,” which they conduct every ten years, I submitted the following list: It is, of course, a doomed mission—but then, it’s only a game. Yet, like most games, it packs meaning in its arbitrary rules. I didn’t think of historical significance or influence but was motivated by a variety of the pleasure principle—one that includes a sense of awe in the presence of achievements that reach deep and far, that expand the very possibilities of the cinema itself (since the cinema itself, the mere fact of sitting in a big, dark room ... Continue reading →