A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s by Stephanie Coontz Basic Books, 2011, 248 pp. IN THE past few decades, the concept of “work-life balance” has assumed a prominent place in our …
This is a moment in American life that cries out for far-flung activism on behalf of a bold democratic agenda. Instead, the partisans of democracy are largely demobilized and defensive. Why? Progressives are apt to blame cynicism spawned by Barack …
As I sat in the crypt of St. Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal on the one-year anniversary of the earthquake in Haiti, with over a thousand Haitians filling the rows, I first felt as if I were at a funeral, a …
The mantra of the current school reform movement in the United States is that high- quality teachers produce high-achieving students. As a result, we should hold teachers accountable for student outcomes, offering bonus pay to the most effective teachers and …
At my grandparents’ house in Tehran, the day began as usual. Breakfast was a smorgasbord of sangak (a thin bread made in a stone oven, bought fresh and warm every day from a local baker), honey, feta cheese, yogurt, and …
The easiest Egyptian revolutionaries for a non-Arabic speaking American to find are the young bloggers, wielders of camera-phones, YouTube uploaders, and social-network activists—”shabab al-Facebook,” as they are sometimes known, the Facebook youth credited with the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak. They …
Rather than engage my argument, Marshall Ganz dismisses it out of hand. He says that I misunderstand his work, but he never says how. Instead, he expounds on his theory of “public narrative” and its ability to move people by …
A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America by Grace Elizabeth Hale Oxford University Press, 2011, 386 pp. CULTURAL REBELLION is at the center of American history and has intersected with …
A Nationalist Conservative revolution has triumphed in Budapest; its leaders are busy dismantling constitutionalism and the rule of law. How could this have happened? And can the Western Left do anything about it? There was a time when Hungary seemed …
In the world I was born into, Israel was an emotion wrapped in an idea. Simply by existing, the Jewish state was a portal to deliverance, and since I had been carried through that portal at birth, so to speak, …
The Left has been a complete, if noble, failure: it’s one of the oldest clichés of American history. “Radicalism in the United States has no great triumphs to record,” asserted Christopher Lasch, and “…the sooner we begin to understand why …
“Democracy is nothing if it is not dangerous,” declared Carl Oglesby in 1965. As president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the largest group on the white New Left, he was rebutting liberals who were displeased that communists could …
We asked four writers to answer these two questions: What is your own relationship to the state of Israel? And how do you think that American Jews, as a whole, should relate to Israel? These weren’t, so to speak, the …
“For about two years now, President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have been co-opting much of the GOP playbook on education. They support charter schools. They endorse merit pay. They decry teacher tenure and seniority. On alternating Thursdays, …
In 2009, The Hurt Locker prompted a great deal of controversy, and not just because it was about a controversial war. Thousands of consumers who wanted to watch the movie downloaded it freely instead of paying for tickets. The movie’s …
