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This Oval Office

Dan Monaco | June2026

Prior to the arrival within its storied circumference of the effulgent portfolio of pathologies bound up in the decreasingly resilient skin of Donald Trump, the symbolic power of the postwar Oval Office relied in part on an oppositional quality.
Existing at once inside of and walled off from the America it guided, the Oval Office in the age of postwar televised politics had served to signify an essence, to throw into stark relief the contrast between the monastic meditations required to keep America on its course and the ephemeral din daily emanating from its worldly circus.
The image of the postwar televised Oval Office was wrought in tandem with an already existing national ambiance, a durable self-conception that understood that whatever America might be at any given moment, the nation has its purpose and the nation and its people have their character.

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From The Archives

winter2017

A House Is Not a Home: Dreaming about Property in America

When asked what her dreams are, Star (Sasha Lane), the displaced, teenage protagonist of Andrea Arnold’s 2016 feature, American Honey, tells a sympathetic trucker that she wants to get her own place—a trailer where she can raise a family. Always just out of reach, the imagined home propels her forward as she travels between towns selling magazine subscriptions, at one point accepting cash in exchange for a sexual encounter with an oil worker. Set on the open road, the film repeatedly depicts the homes of Star’s potential customers—lavish mansions whose inhabitants thoughtlessly discard jewelry amongst piles of presents or happily offer cash to watch the spunky teenager drink tequila. Honey is Arnold’s inaugural portrait of American culture, a bold, dreamy declaration that, regardless
BY    Alison Kozberg
June 3, 2025
winter2017

From the Editors

When political economist and social reformer Henry George died in 1897, his funeral was attended by thousands who proceeded from Grand Central Palace in Manhattan to Brooklyn City Hall on their way to Green-Wood Cemetery, his final resting place.

BY    Editor
February 21, 2023

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