Blood of the Liberals, from which this piece is excerpted, tells the private and public story of three generations in the twentieth century. My maternal grandfather, George Huddleston, was a populist congressman who represented Birmingham, Alabama, from 1915 to 1937. …
To be or not to be? That was Tony Blair’s question this past spring when the British prime minister debated whether or not to take paternity leave after the birth of his fourth child, Leo. The fascinating thing about this …
The vagaries of artistic reputation are a recurrent fascination of cultural life. Canons boom but also redeploy. There is a time to gather respect and a time to cast it away. The movements of conventional wisdom up and down, to …
Four years after passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, many government and media reports have declared welfare reform a success. They measure success by reduction in the number of those receiving welfare checks and to some …
Dr. Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel ed. Richard H. Minear, introduction by Art Spiegelman The New Press, 1999, 272 pp., $25 Somehow, all the hypsters who compiled end-of-century, best-of-the-millennium lists neglected …
Half of adult Americans cannot understand jury instructions or summarize basic information about schools from a simple chart. Although some are recent immigrants, most are products of our primary and secondary school system—whose mission is to produce citizens capable of …
What Workers Want by Richard B. Freeman and Joel Rogers Cornell University ILR Press, 1999, 226 pp., $17.95 What Workers Want is a sharply focused study of how American workers think about workplace participation. Its authors, Harvard economist Richard Freeman …
Before November 1999, few Americans knew what “WTO” meant, much less understood its workings. The World Trade Organization evolved from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and was officially created in 1995. Membership has now reached 135 nations …
A year ago, two unexpected incidents, one involving an international crisis and the other a domestic one, each associated with protests, sent shock waves through China and provoked surprising responses by the Beijing regime. Taken together, these incidents and the …
The Third Way/Die Neue Mitte Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroeder This manifesto, issued by the prime ministers of Britain and Germany, seemed to us to warrant critical attention, which we asked Joanne Barkan, one of our editors, to provide. Eds. …
The inner city as a character, not as mere background, became in the 1990s one of the staples of American film. For more than a decade, independent and studio directors dramatized the most convulsive, violent, and self-destructive inner-city lives. They …
The Sound Bite Society: Television and the American Mind by Jeffrey Scheuer Four Walls Eight Windows, 1999, 280 pp., $23.95 Above all, keep it short. The message must be brisk, colorful, and to the point. Just say it and get …
The perfect battle can’t be picked. However flawed politically, the confrontation inspired by the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle this past December had enough going for it to be worthy of progressives’ support. The growing hegemony of business, the …
In his appreciation of Milwaukee’s civility, David Glenn calls the state defense of civic order “a fundamental and necessary condition of a decent society.” But I don’t think our current state is defending civic order; it’s defending the concentration of …
The afterlife of the Vietnam War has lasted longer now than the war itself. Time makes new wounds. A host of legends clamor to make the disaster mean something. First things first. Symbolic Vietnam ought not to obscure the existence …
