At a conference, I kept hearing the term “emerging countries.” After awhile I leaned over and asked my neighbor, Noel Ramírez, then president of Nicaragua’s Central Bank, if Nicaragua was an emerging country. He whispered back, “submerging.” Noel was being …
Instant communication has conquered space and time. The gap between the far away and the near-at-hand has dwindled. Only a few years ago, this phenomenon thrilled us. We grew enchanted with our new ways of life, our newly ubiquitous culture. …
Vignettes from recovery work in New Orleans
I returned to Cuba in January 1999 after an absence of thirty-eight years, accompanied by the ghosts of a past I had never lived and by my twenty-nine-year-old son, who was curious about the place his father had spoken and …
Against Michael Kazin
The galvanizing effect of one politician on changing the food stamp program–now someone should do the same for the survivors of Hurricane Katrina
Search Order What are these gentlemen looking for in my house? What is this officer doing reading the sheet of paper on which I’ve written the words “ambition,” “lightness,” and “brittle”? What hint of conspiracy speaks to him from the …
The French commitment to the thirty-five-hour work week.
To succeed, social-democratic movements in the global South must steer a course toward a society without poverty or social exclusion, avoiding two current utopian projects. The first utopia is a neoliberal fantasy, the self-regulating market. In the words of Karl …
This past November, the Cuban poet and journalist Raúl Rivero made what I believe was his first public appearance in New York City. Rivero was for awhile a leading journalist of the Cuban state—the Moscow correspondent during the 1970s for …
Iraq and Increased Legitimacy for International Trusteeship
Why won’t the Democrats learn from Kansas?
Most political biographers choose a subject whom they either admire or loathe. They then spend years attempting to understand what, for example, made Martin Luther King, Jr., an inspiring leader of the black freedom struggle or drove Stalin to order …
Karl Widerquist looks at John Maynard Keynes’s essay
The unhappy parallels between America’s “long hot summer” and France’s recent upheavals
