BEFORE THE Jamaican elections last December I visited Clive Dobson, president of the National Workers Union (NWU), at the union’s modest, two-story office amid the Victorian decay of downtown Kingston. Michael Manley headed this union for nearly twenty years before …
Should “Americanization” take place by consent of the governed? The question was posed eight decades ago by a rebellious intellectual, Randolph Bourne. He was responding to polemics—both political and cultural—about “hyphenated-Americanism,” roused by immigration but more broadly by a changing …
This is a good and useful book. At a time when mediocre economic performance is celebrated as though it were excellent, and when even the ugly consequences of mediocre performance, such as rising inequality, are commonly treated as though they …
The collapse of the Asian economies was one of the great economic surprises of the last half-century. Countries recently celebrated as “economic tigers” are now recipients of a $121 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and are seen …
For some time time now it has been fashionable to bemoan the end of the age of the great French intellectuals. In the early 1980s, Sartre, Barthes, Lévi-Strauss, and Foucault all passed from the scene. Louis Althusser experienced a metaphorical …
At the 1992 Republican Convention, Newt Gingrich hurled the nastiest salvo he could think of toward Bill Clinton, saying that the allegedly libidinous governor of Arkansas had “Woody Allen family values” (in stark contrast to Garth Brooks’s televised eulogy for …
The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism by Thomas Frank University of Chicago Press, 1997 272 pp $22.95 Over the past decade, cool has become the trademark of American consumerism. The triumph of cool …
In October 1996 a rebellion broke out in eastern Zaire and spread with astonishing rapidity from one end of the country to the other, toppling in the course of seven months the thirty-year dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko. For those …
Our interview with the leader of the Italian Democratic Party of the Left, Massimo D’Alema, suggests the difficulties faced by European social democracy as it struggles to adjust to, but also to resist, the material and ideological power of the …
In December 1997, the Edwards Aquifer Authority conducted a series of public hearings in five south Texas communities. It wanted to know what people thought about proposed new rules governing withdrawals from the region’s large aquifer. Years of excessive pumping …
As Bill Clinton looked me straight in the eye, tightened his jaw, and denied having sex with “that woman,” I had a fantasy: suppose, on that historic 60 Minutes episode in 1992, he had said, “Yes, I had an affair …
The history of Nikolai Bukharin’s novel is almost certainly unique—even in the dismal twentieth century with its mountain of literature written by people doomed by politics. Normally we would be deeply moved by the tragic fate of the book and …
Among contemporary students of popular culture, a consensus has begun to emerge about American television quite different from the view dominant only a few decades ago. The theorists of “mass society” criticized commercial television from a standpoint informed both by …
If Bill Clinton were impeached or forced to resign over the Lewinsky case, the incident might force a national examination of how men in power treat female subordinates. The most important question his alleged behavior raises, after all, is not …
At the beginning of 1998, accounts of massacres in Algeria horrified world opinion. The start of the holy month of Ramadan brought reports that whole villages had been savagely attacked; men, women, and children were systematically slaughtered. More than seventy …
