Winter 2024

An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War by J. Hoberman The New Press, 2011, 432 pp. From High Noon to The Ten Commandments, from low-budget horror films like Them! to noir melodramas like Panic …

Democracy’s Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent by Ernest Freeberg Harvard University Press, 2008, 392 pp., $29.95 [contentblock id=20 img=gcb.png] Newsweek proclaimed that Barack Obama’s budget means, “We’re all socialists now,” and conservative erstwhile presidential …

Books discussed: Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta; American Woman by Susan Choi; The Darling by Russell Banks; The Company You Keep by Neil Gordon.

When Barrington Moore, Jr., died October 16 at age ninety-two, I remembered the mandatory meetings for coffee he scheduled with students at the place he called “the greasy spoon down the block” in Harvard Square. At the time—1966 and 1967—I …

Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bait and Switch

If only working-class and poor people would register and vote, liberal Democrats would win every election-that’s what we thought, until November 2, 2004. Democrats work on voter registration, Republicans work on vote suppression. So tens of millions were spent on …

Two time honored beliefs about the media were dented by our impeachment year: the right-wing notion that the press has a “liberal bias” and the left-wing theory that the media control public consciousness. Thanks to independent counsel Kenneth Starr, both …