Mark G. Brennan

Latest by Mark G. Brennan in Chronicles

• Society & Culture

  January 2019

  Trump’s Razor

  Blame everything on Trump. Your car won’t start? It’s Trump’s fault. Your dog threw up in the living room? It’s Trump’s fault. The media have lost their collective mind. That’s definitely Trump’s fault. And the blame game seems to get worse by the day.

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• Society & Culture

  December 2018

  Citizen Sunflower and America’s Future

  Cancer imposes innumerable indignities on its victims. In addition to possible death, the disease, its complications, and its treatment also force patients through the most inhumane gauntlet of our health-care system.

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• Reviews

  November 2018

  What Leads to What

  When Adam Tooze’s latest book, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, hit bookstores this past August, I suggested I review it to Chilton. He immediately agreed. Within days the gargantuan review copy landed with a thud like a stack of foreclosure notices on my doorstep.

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• Society & Culture

  October 2018

  Double-Blind in Academia

  There are many ways to commit suicide in academia today. Bret Weinstein, a biology professor at Evergreen State College, opted not to take part in the school’s annual “Day of Absence” celebration.

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• Society & Culture

  September 2018

  Selling Them the Rope

  The United States recently came under an attack by an activity so insidious that Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and his Wisconsin colleague Tammy Baldwin joined forces in an effort to demand it be “reined in.”

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• Society & Culture

  August 2018

  Uber Über Odor

  My wife and I obey a simple rule regarding our leisure travel: She makes the plans; I follow them. Since she enjoys researching hotels and locations, and my tastes overlap with hers, we find it easier for her to do all the planning without any inputs or complaints from me.

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• Society & Culture

  June 2018

  Syria and Our Deaths of Despair

  Just two days after the alleged April 9 chemical attack in Douma, Syria, TV host Tucker Carlson asked Mississippi Republican Sen. Roger Wicker, “What is the American national security interest that would be served by regime change in Syria?”

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• Society & Culture

  May 2018

  Hogging the Guns

  Facts ruin bad arguments. So let these facts sink in for a minute. According to the FBI, in 2016 murderers using handguns killed 7, 105 Americans. That same year, murderers using any kind of rifle killed only 374 Americans.

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• Society & Culture

  April 2018

  Venting Is Not Enough: Nassar and Injustice

  Imagine a justice system that functioned as follows. While awaiting sentencing after conviction, the vilest criminals would be put in the public dock, surrounded by angry spectators.

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• Society & Culture

  March 2018

  An Unexpected Journey

  I’ve spent the last few months hobbling around Manhattan, one of America’s last walkable cities. In keeping with New Yorkers’ well-deserved stereotype for brusqueness, strangers on the sidewalk frequently ask me, “Why are you limping?”

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• Society & Culture

  February 2018

  A Patriotic Tax Plan

  Aside from its sheer incomprehensibility, the U.S. federal tax code is immoral, by design. Its 75,000 pages exceed its 1917 length 187-fold. Paradoxically, even though the tax code contains more than four million words, the United States effectively has no tax code.

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• Society & Culture

  January 2018

  Afghanistan’s Depraved Opportunism

  In “Staying the Course in Afghanistan: How to Fight the Longest War,” published in the November/December 2017 Foreign Affairs, retired Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal and one Kosh Sadat, both employed by the eponymous McChrystal Group, argue for the United States to pursue more war in Afghanistan.

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• Society & Culture

  December 2017

  Weinstein: Who Cares—and Why

  The public support of Weinstein, along with the deafening silence and lack of pity for his forsaken wife and young children, stand as testament to a sick subculture where families, and family, have never jibed with Hollywood’s libertine agenda.

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• Society & Culture

  November 2017

  America Mispriced

  Warren Buffett once joked that only when the tide goes out do we realize who’s been swimming naked. Hurricane Harvey’s gale force winds and 50-plus inches of rain will give Houstonians a similarly embarrassing realization.

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• Society & Culture

  October 2017

  Core Values and the Kingdom

  Saudi Arabia’s national oil and natural-gas company, Saudi Aramco, recently announced plans to go public in 2018. Dating back to the fuel shortages of World War I, Saudi Aramco came into existence largely as a result of Standard Oil’s frustrating search for oil on the Arabian Peninsula.

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• Society & Culture

  September 2017

  Outdated

  Albert and David Maysles’s classic documentary Grey Gardens provided a disturbing snapshot of 1970’s American upper-class life, replete with mentally ill dowagers, feral cats, and a crumbling estate.

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• Society & Culture

  August 2017

  Corporate Responsibility: An Indecent Proposal

  This past semester a group of bored yet curious students at my university invited faculty to participate in a lunch-hour debate. When the organizers first contacted me they referenced several of my former students who praised my heretical outspokenness as key to my selection.

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• Society & Culture

  July 2017

  A Free Ride to Clown College

  Not content to suffer quietly under a $352 billion state debt, a crumbling post-World War II infrastructure, and a $65 billion unfunded pension liability in its largest city, the state of New York hastened its impending financial devastation this spring by announcing the latest Blue State special: free college tuition.

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• Reviews

  October 2013

  Blowing Bubbles

  Between 2000 and 2005 I found myself spending an increasing amount of time scratching my head. I had been researching and investing in financial-services stocks since 1992, but what I saw during that five-year span confounded me.

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• News

  August 2013

  Cuba: Distorted History, Different Rules

  This past May in Newark, the FBI added former Black Liberation Army mercenary Joanne Chesimard to its Most Wanted Terrorists list at a ceremony held on the 40th anniversary of New Jersey’s most infamous cop killing.

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