It’s tempting to view 1968 in the United States and Western Europe as a repetition of 1848—and, contrary to Marx’s axiom, one fully as tragic the second time around. In both years, radical movements mainly of the young made daring, …
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army Jeremy Scahill Nation Books, 2007 464 pp $26.95 Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry P.W. Singer Cornell University Press, 2007 (first edition, …
IN THE EVER-EVOLVING and convoluted story of affirmative action in the United States, June 28, 2007 will stand out as a paradox. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority managed in one ruling to undermine racial integration in primary and secondary education …
Nineteen sixty-eight was a formative year for a generation of the left. Later, some observers (and participants) of philosophical bent thought to capture “the events” in a comment made long before by Hegel. After seeing Napoleon enter town following the …
Norman Mailer came to public attention as the young author of a best-selling novel of 1948, The Naked and the Dead. It quickly became one of three war novels by Americans that any reader of that generation was likely to …
We are in the middle of the most politically gripping Democratic primary campaign in recent memory, and, with a lead time of almost two months, there is nothing that we can say about it that will be readable or relevant …
On George Konrád’s A Guest in My Own Country and The City Builder.
Alexis de Tocqueville was so impressed with American jurisprudence that he called jury duty a free school for learning personal rights and practical law. But for decades being summoned to jury duty taught me different lessons—how to game the system …
Daniel A. Bell engages in the timely and worthy task of looking at an important social issue in East Asia—the employment of domestic workers—from a Confucian perspective. In Hong Kong, for example, live-in foreign domestic helpers (most domestic helpers in …
I have never served on a jury, but I have been a potential juror, waiting in the basement of the Trenton courthouse with many others. Four or five times I was called to sit there, for a couple of days …
The collapse of the credit markets over the last year has hit more than just the homebuilding and mortgage sectors of the economy. As interest rates increased, private equity, or “PE,” an important new form of financial capital, was also …
Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski.
It was a drug deal gone bad. Two white men from the suburbs drive to Harlem one night to buy cocaine. There’s a hassle, a shot, and one of them ends up dead. The judge in the state criminal court …
When I worked as a regular newspaper columnist, I absorbed two informal, folkloric strictures on subject matter: No columns based on conversations with cab drivers and none touting jury service as a magisterium of democracy, where one’s faith in the …
About ten years ago, a close friend came to visit me in Hong Kong. This friend—now director of a center for ethics at a prestigious American university—seemed surprised when informed that my family had hired a live-in domestic helper to …
