Winter 2024

To borrow from the Jews—with somewhat different nuance—it’s hard to be a black. For example: an American occupation that, almost from the beginning, came to be identified with the position of black men in the society was that of the …

What is a good tax law? Radicals are likely to apply three criteria to legislative handiwork. If, as economists in the days of the Old Welfare economics used to believe and socialists continue to believe, human beings are approximately equal …

Are the rights and liberties of the American people being sent to hell in a basket? Or do they stand relatively secure, unaffected by “law and order” counter-pressures? Social and political tensions have been mounting through the late ’60s. For …

Black union activity is on the Increase. Blacks are organizing new locals among hospital workers, municipal employees, and in the retail and service trades. Black caucuses form at union conventions, and there are national black caucuses within the United Auto …

What is a magazine these days without its judicious film critic, whether for scene significant or kitsch unlimited: Stanley Kubrick cannot be too heavy, nor Peter Fonda too light. But why do they all read like Polonius? Maybe their trouble—at …

The best long-term bet [for combating poverty], we think, is simply education. Despite some encouraging studies of compensatory programs, experience suggests education is a better engine of social advancement than any alternative. And partly because too much energy has been …

This book on the German academy in the Wilhelmian and Weimar periods is a monument to scholarly craftsmanship, flawed only by the author’s infection with a disease similar to one he diagnoses in his subject—an excessive concern with pure Geist. …

These volumes, the product of extensive meetings by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Seminar on Race and Poverty, are just about the best items in the copious literature on poverty, which has been a minor growth industry ever …

Noam Chomsky dedicates these essays “to the brave young men who refuse to serve in a criminal war.” This dedication reflects the tone and mood of the entire book, which is a record of Chomsky’s increasingly outraged response to the …

Civil disobedience is often hailed as an eloquent method of protest, a way of arousing the moral conscience of society. But today it can also be used by some students and black militants as a weapon in an assault on …

President Nixon’s speech on November 3rd almost certainly rallied a majority of the people behind his policy. But that vote of confidence is strictly limited as to time, as on a similar occasion Lyndon Johnson discovered; and if, as seems …

The construction industry, as anyone knows who has tried to build himself even the tiniest summer place, is one of the most backward in the country. Obsolete building codes, “political peddling,” restrictive practices of builders and contractors, the practices of …

Dodge Main, an ungainly collection of four- and six-story, 1920s-genre factory buildings, occupies roughly a square mile of Hamtramck just across the Detroit City line. The front-office windows are wire-meshed against some feared assault, or perhaps just against small boys …

There’s a beguiling quality to the style of Fidel Castro. Surely we have never known another Communist chieftain like him. Here is a leader in the Soviet Union’s “family” of nations, hailed in Moscow each May Day, who yet lashes …

The Western German election this past September could mark a turning point in the political history of a country dominated, since its inception, by conservative forces. A positive answer has been given to two important questions: (1) whether the strategy …