Some years ago, when it became obvious that the labor movement was in trouble, when membership figures were dropping, academics came up with novel ideas to provide some measure of protection for unorganized workers. Only one suggestion was rooted in …
How does one recognize the looming inevitable? In the 1760s, the British, having defeated the French in America and expanded George III’s overseas empire, saw only profit and prestige ahead. A New England cleric, the Reverend Samuel Cooper, told his …
On David Rothkopf’s Superclass, Ha-Joon Chang’s Bad Samaritans, and Mark Engler’s How to Rule the World
The countries of Latin America remain highly susceptible to international political and economic trends. Since 2002, the region has prospered: growth has been close to 6 percent per year—the highest since the 1970s, and far above the lackluster, long-run average …
The current financial and economic crisis has once again placed the dangers of capitalism at the forefront of our collective consciousness. The left, which until relatively recently had seemed adrift across much of the Western world, lacking in coherent and …
Turkey is unique among contemporary Muslim societies. Modern Turkey emerged as a nation-state after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the abolition of the Caliphate in 1924 and has been a republic since 1923. Discarding the theological trappings of …
In the fall of 2008, a little more than a year after the Bank for International Settlements (a Switzerland-based organization that fosters cooperation between central banks) warned that “years of loose monetary policy have fuelled a giant credit bubble, leaving …
“Know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away, know when to run,” the gambler says in a popular song. But in the aftermath of imperialism and war, walking away is not so simple. …
When he was named acting president of Russia on December 31, 1999, Vladimir Putin inherited a country still reeling from the Soviet Union’s breakup: economic woes caused by the rapid privatization of state assets and the August 1998 financial crisis, …
The publication in the October 6, 2008, New Yorker of a selection of the more than fifty thousand Norman Mailer letters that have been archived reminds us of what a vacuum he left when he died in November 2007 at …
In the wake of the Tet offensive, on March 31, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson announced a partial halt to the bombing of North Vietnam, initiated peace talks with Hanoi, and declared he would not run for a second term. In …
On the politics and novels of J.M. Coetzee
On Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age
The U.S. Supreme Court reacted slowly to the constitutional questions raised by post–September 11, 2001, anti-terror strategies. Many questions of constitutional law are still unanswered. There have been no rulings on the “special treatment” of detainees in the fight against …
At 1:27 a.m. on the morning of August 4, 2005, Herbert Manes stabbed Robert Monroe—known as “Shorty”—to death on the 1400 block of West Oakland Street in North Philadelphia. No newspaper reported the incident. Arrested and charged with homicide, Manes …
