Ralph Nader and the Will to Marginality
A classic book of social psychology analyzes a flying saucer cult of the 1950s. This small band of Americans believed that on a particular date soon to come, the world would be engulfed by a flood of biblical proportions-but also … {…}
Anti-Anti-Americanism
Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated by Gore Vidal, Why Do People Hate America? by Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies, “What We Think of America” Granta Issue 77, “Dissent from the Homeland: Essays after September 11,” The South Atlantic Quarterly Spring
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Todd Gitlin Responds
If wishes were arguments, the strongest argument for an American war would be the most ambitious-the wish, or prayer, that by deposing Saddam Hussein and occupying Iraq, the United States would install the first democratic regime in the Arab world, … {…}
Appreciating Radical Liberalism
The Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism, 1945-1970 by Kevin Mattson
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Empire and Myopia
There are some who think that because the United States has global interests and a heart of gold, it is entitled to act just as it pleases, economically and militarily, anywhere it pleases-not a bad first approximation to the classical … {…}
Beneath the Surface: John Singer Sargent and the Gilded Age
The vagaries of artistic reputation are a recurrent fascination of cultural life. Canons boom but also redeploy. There is a time to gather respect and a time to cast it away. The movements of conventional wisdom up and down, to … {…}
Unforgettable Vietnam and its Burdens: Twenty-Five Years After the War’s End
The afterlife of the Vietnam War has lasted longer now than the war itself. Time makes new wounds. A host of legends clamor to make the disaster mean something. First things first. Symbolic Vietnam ought not to obscure the existence … {…}
Florida Fantasy
AMERICAN BEACH: HOW PROGRESS ROBBED A BLACK TOWN—AND NATION—OF HISTORY, WEALTH, AND POWER by Russ Rymer HarperCollins, 1998 337 pp. $25 cloth $14 paper Russ Rymer has written a powerful book of what C. Wright Mills called “sociological poetry,” escorting … {…}
Response to Marshall Berman
Instead of critical culture, “struggl[ing] actively over how human beings should live,” we have a pale culture of critics. Censorship is a permanent irritation but serious-minded people (who can also be joyful, why not?) need to face up to the … {…}
The Last Page
Collective memory goes up for grabs wherever people suffer from dispossession and feel the call of pride. Memories are not born but made, remade, not natural but “constructed,” and like the memorials constructed to overcome memory, they are—and of necessity … {…}
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The Struggle for Cheap Meat on the Lower East Side· May 17, 2013 ·
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Belabored Podcast #6: “That Can Get You Fired”· May 17, 2013 ·
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Young U.S. Citizens Call on Obama to Reunite Families· May 16, 2013 ·
