A guy who says he's the virus-man keeps up with me no matter how fast I run. That's weird because he's sickly-looking, needs a shave, has mousy thinning hair...

JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR: DAY 1 3/15/20 Starting Journal of the Plague Year on the Ides of March. Hmm. Today's stats: USA infected 2805/59 deaths Denmark (...

Trump’s 2020 State of the Union address In the midst of a predictably partisan impeachment trial, Donald Trump said not a word about the ongoing process or h...

An interview with George Blecher on US politics in the age of Trump George Blecher Adam Reichardt Media acceleration puts enormous emphasis on speed, creatin...

Donald Trump’s achievements thus far have been rhetorical. But whether Democrats can take advantage of his weakness remains doubtful. Following the longest g...

LATELY, MADISON SQUARE PARK has provided a staging area for provocative art installations, pop-up food courts and outdoor work spaces. Perhaps what most peop...

As Donald Trump appals and captivates the world in equal measure, another New York businessman is quietly positioning himself for power. American democracy m...

In the latest of his Battle Dispatches from the electoral front, George Blecher visits the heartlands of the Trump vote in the swing states of Pennsylvania a...

I owned the cottage right from the beginning. Or it owned me. For one thing, it was so old. Later we found it on maps dating back to the mid-1700s — it was i...

George Blecher pinpoints exactly what it is that confuses Americans about the actions of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who, prior to the bombing of the Boston Marathon,...

He pointed a way for American fiction out of the doldrums of postmodernism, writes George Blecher. For a culture troubled by the corrosive commercial media a...

Email, text messaging and social networks have revolutionized the way we communicate. Yet as the magic of instantaneity fades, George Blecher begins to miss ...

Tough materialism and existential frankness, an awareness of one’s mortality balanced by the refusal to talk bullshit: George Blecher selects three works of ...

No translator can translate equally well. A lot gets lost in translation. Some languages don’t translate well. These are just some of the translator’s dirty ...

At first you don’t notice them. They’re so skinny that in a crowd of three or more at a street corner or in a mall, they disappear. When you finally see them...

Eating in a Manhattan midtown restaurant the other night, I happened to glance over at the bar area. People were perched on bar stools, leaning into each ot...

In the light of the American presidential election in November 2004, George Blecher muses on the growing gap between those sympathising with the left and tho...

George Blecher discusses the timeliness of Thorstein Veblen’s “Theory of the Leisure Class” and traces his own lust for the “predatoriness” of the leisure cl...

Additionally published in Wespennest (Vienna)