I’m not qualified to answer question two, so consider this a response to the other three questions. Internet, film, television, and popular music are rather broad categories, each containing nutritious wheat and faddish chaff. By “television,” do we mean The …
In Defense of Lost Causes by Slavoj Žižek Verso, 2008, 504 pp., $34.95 In a stream of writings and talks since 1989, the Slovenian social theorist Slavoj Žižek has blended Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegelian philosophy with film criticism, cultural studies, …
It is a difficult time for a rational defense of religion. Because for most of my life I thought of myself as an atheist (and in certain moods still do), I never imagined that I would find myself a defender. …
Europe is suffering from its highest level of unemployment in more than a generation, and European social democrats have been unable to formulate an effective political response. One in ten of Europe’s workers are without paid work. The number amounts …
Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist, godfather of microcredit, and founder of the now-famous Grameen Bank, enchants many different types of people with his imaginings of a better future. A popular public speaker, Yunus is a relatively short man with a …
The recession that started in December 2007 was already in its ninth month when a tumultuous ten days in September 2008 shook the world. First the U.S. government nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; then the investment banking house Merrill …
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon Anchor Books, 2009, 468 pp., $16.95 As the playwright and chronicler of twentieth-century African American life August Wilson recognized, …
On April 27 of this year, Air Force One rattled windows and shocked New Yorkers when it did a low flyover above New York Harbor. The flyover was deliberate. Government officials thought that it was time to update the pictures …
The musical symbol of the European Union is the work of a former Nazi Party member. How this happened and what it says about the new Europe is troubling. The European anthem is the instrumental melody of “Ode to Joy,” …
Among the unpleasant surprises that awaited Barack Obama’s administration during the post-election turmoil in Iran, the unexpected role of the Internet must have been most rankling. A few government wonks might have expected Iranians to rebel, but who could predict …
The High Line, the elevated train track built in the 1930s to service the warehouses on Manhattan’s West Side, should by rights have been torn down in the 1980s, when trains stopped using it. But instead, a small miracle happened. …
This past April, the U.S. Department of Defense released an inauspicious two-page “Fact Sheet” outlining the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), a comprehensive examination of the U.S. military’s strategic posture. Such a document rarely raises eyebrows outside the cloistered world …
Let the people speak! Words enshrined in American political life since we were but a collection of colonies and the issues of the day were aired and decided at the Town Hall Meetings that defined the political culture of the …
The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities by Frank Donoghue Fordham University Press, 2008, 172 pp., $22.00 How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation by Marc Bousquet NYU Press, 2008, 304 pp., …
On June 4, 2009, Poland celebrated the twenty-year mark since the first (partially) free elections in the Soviet bloc, the result of the roundtables where communist and Solidarity leaders negotiated what we now recognize as the beginning of the end …
