Spring 2025

Shortly after he became the first general secretary of the World Trade Organization, Renato Ruggiero observed, “We are no longer writing the rules of interaction among separate national economies. We are writing the constitution of a single global economy.” The …

I met Volodia Teitelboin today, and he told me General Prats had resigned. He was replaced by the chief-of-staff. General Pinochet? That’s right. Volodia thinks the change will strengthen the government and ward off the threat of a coup. He …

Teaching Humanities to the Poor

Changing the Powers That Be, How the Left Can Stop Losing and Win by William Domhoff

The Republican governor of Alabama, Bob Riley, stunned conservatives last year by pushing through the state legislature a tax reform plan that offered tax relief to the poorest in his state while significantly increasing the burden borne by wealthy individuals …

In the fall of 2001 a slight book with a stern title, Call to Order: Investigation Concerning the New Reactionaries, sent minor shock waves throughout Parisian intellectual circles. The book’s author was Daniel Lindenberg, a historian and frequent contributor to …

When I was fourteen and fifteen, I used to ride my bike three miles to a bookshop run by people whom I thought of vaguely as beatniks. The owner was a man in his late twenties, dark-haired, bearded, scholastically gaunt. …

Though full-length documentary films go back to the work of Robert Flaherty in the 1920s (Nanook of the North, Man of Aran), they have always been the uncommercial stepchild of movies that tell made-up stories. In their marginal way, documentaries …

Naguib Mahfouz in the Life of an Israeli Friend

Since the start of the second Palestinian Intifada in September 2000 there has been a resurgence of interest in a one-state bi-national model for solving the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The idea is achieving increasing popularity among people on …

Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin by John D’Emilio The Free Press, 2003, 576 pp., $35.00Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin Devon W. Carbado and Donald Wiese, eds. Cleis Press, 2003, 355 pp., …

Alain Tanner’s 1976 film Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 qualified as an instant classic among my cohorts-American leftists of the sixties generation. Ask a few if they saw the film years ago, and you’ll probably get …

Over the past ten years, there has been a growing gap in perception over the state of American democracy. The vast majority of the Washington press corps-including many pundits critical of the Bush administration-is inclined to see what has happened …

Arab Politics Before and After the Iraq War