Torture and Democracy by Darius Rejali Princeton University Press, 2007, 880 pp., $39.95 America, under George W. Bush, became a torturing country. Everyone knows it. One of Bush’s worst lies is this: “I’ve said to the people that we don’t …
For all their differences, the two leading presidential candidates have both spotlighted the promotion of human rights internationally as a cornerstone of a rebuilt American foreign policy. John McCain, breaking from Republican orthodoxy, has said that “promoting human rights abroad …
Kirill Medvedev is a new and very attractive figure on the Russian cultural landscape. A poet first, he published two books of confessional free verse early in this decade to much acclaim as well as controversy. Soon after, spurred in …
In April 1983, the U.S. Department of Education published A Nation at Risk, (ANAR) a “landmark” report lamenting the condition of American public education. It was the culmination of criticism that had been mounting since early in the cold war …
In retrospect, the nineties can seem an anomalous decade, the only one since the Second World War when technological civilization did not appear particularly bent on self-destruction. Of course, not everyone greeted the end of the cold war as the …
Race and gender—hot topics, even without the recent primary election that pitted a black man against a white woman. With it, they’re incendiary. But even a brief look at the historical record tells us how much the past is parent …
The 2008 Democratic primary campaign was an extraordinary political event—actually, given the length of our election process, a long series of events—which both energized and divided the most important constituencies of the American liberal-left. We don’t know how the energy …
“The service was not so good,” an acquaintance told me of the highly rated restaurant for which she had made reservations six months in advance. A waitress myself, I asked what she meant. Pausing, she came up with only one …
In the spring of 1995, when Lane Kirkland’s old order was toppling and John Sweeney’s young(er) Turks were poised to revitalize the American labor movement, one of the movement’s leading operatives gave me his take on what was behind the …
When we think of the founding of the early colonies, we usually think of the journey to freedom, in particular of the Puritans fleeing religious persecution to settle the Massachusetts Bay Colony. But it was not so for a majority …
I began to write these lines while listening to a speech by Hugo Chávez at a summit of the Andean Community of Nations in Lima, Peru, some time in 2005. As inspiration for this article, the speech helped crystallize my …
Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists by Susan Neiman Harcourt, 2008, 480 pp., $27.00 Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal by Rob Riemen Yale University Press, 2008, 116 pp., $22 In 2001 Susan Neiman published Evil in Modern Thought: …
Too many Americans have bought into the idea that most of our nation’s problems can be blamed on our school system, and that the only way to solve them is through “school reform.” It’s an old story, but it became …
Last January, the New York Times reported that assembly line workers at Detroit automobile factories, who have been earning around $28 per hour, would be “bought out” and gradually replaced by workers earning as little as half of that. This …
Think back to a year and a half ago, to spring 2007, when this all began. Despite Hillary Clinton’s advantages in connections and money going into the primaries, those in the know cited a multitude of reasons she would fall …
