Fall 2025

Soft interventionism in Liberia

In the 1980s and early 1990s, one could be forgiven for getting the impression that Germans had a monopoly on self-obsessed debates about their “identity.” When the country was still divided, politicians and intellectuals joined in what seemed to be …

Signs and portents abounded that Good Friday in New Orleans as our group of New York City high school students, parents, and teachers rolled in to spend the spring break doing “relief” work. Lawns and green median strips sprouted campaign …

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

Or, This Page Cannot be Displayed

The bankruptcy filing in October of last year by the Delphi Corporation, the giant auto-parts supplier spun off by General Motors in a 1999 public offering, sent a shock wave across the American labor movement. The slow grinding down of …

Target Zero: A Life in Writing by Eldridge Cleaver

Confronting the political and cultural issues of teaching political theory in China

When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America by Ira Katznelson

In a rundown, dirt-stained building in El Alto, Bolivia, five young men sit behind a rickety linoleum-topped table on an auditorium stage. A rainbow banner—known locally as the Wiphala, a flag representing half a millennium of indigenous resistance—hangs on the …

When I hear professional critics, or my students, bemoan the commodification of art, a wave of irritation engulfs me. Yes, yes, I think, we live in a capitalist society where art, like other things, is bought and sold. This is …

On a cold winter afternoon in 1960, my wife and I pored over blueprints in the Grand Street office of the United Housing Federation, a nonprofit foundation created after the war with the support of organized labor to build middle-income …

On Munich and Moral Ambiguity