Just how enlightening can even an enlightened despot be? That is the underlying question of Richard Lowenthal’s study of Communist policy toward the Third World—and a most welcome study it is. Lowenthal brings insight and erudition to an area in …
What’s in a name? Frequently not very much, not even in the name of a political party. In the United States, for example, the Republican party does not reject the political system of democracy, at least not in theory even …
A little while ago Time magazine reported President Jimmy Carter to have said, “I listen to classical music eight to ten hours a day.” Eight to ten hours a day? Astounding. Obviously a misprint. But no, a later story, again in …
Several years ago I began a study of modernity. I meant to explore both the history of ideas—such ideas as “modern times,” “modern society,” “the modern predicament,” and so on—and the human realities that these ideas were meant to grasp. …
The recapture of the hijacked plane at Mogadishu, the death of three leading terrorists in Stammheim prison, and the murder of kidnapped industrialist Schleyer may, for a while, have put an end to the wave of terrorism in West Germany. …
New York City’s financial crisis has been a tragedy for many Americans who never travel east of the Hudson River. Wherever public employees demand a living wage, women’s groups demand day-care facilities for children, poor people demand adequate health care, …
Toward the end of this exhaustive study, Mr. Fried compresses a definition of McCarthyism into “semantic violence.” The dictionary consensus defines it as reckless accusation of pro-Communist activity unsupported by proof or, more generally, as the employment of unfair investigative …
Mihajlo Mihajlov, the writer and student of Russian literature, is currently serving a seven-year prison term for dissemination of “hostile propaganda” in his native Yugoslavia. His publication of the essays reprinted in this volume was responsible for his present incarceration. …
Those of us who were raised on that version of the Russian Revolution symbolized in the storming of the Petrograd Winter Palace and the dramatic gesture of Antonov-Ovseenko, he of the broadbrimmed, black felt hat, as he bursts into the …
It is billed, by its own production company, as a “warm and comic exploration of the rapidly changing world of a group of friends working on a small weekly newspaper.” And certainly it is this softness that accounts for its …
How do you get a fair union election? Sometimes it becomes a dizzying experience, as Edward Sadlowski has discovered after running as an insurgent candidate for president of the huge United Steelworkers of America.
W hen I was small I lived in Ottawa. My father worked for the Canadian government. And I suppose that is what Ottawa evokes for the foreign reader. It is Canberra or Kuala Lumpur, Commonwealth Capital, with parliamentary politics and …
A year ago, Senator Frank E. Moss of Utah made headlines when he revealed that he and some of his staff members had posed as patients in New York City “Medicaid mills,” where they received unnecessary tests and treatment. In …
What a tourist can learn in a few weeks about the political situation of a country is notoriously questionable. All I propose to do here is to supplement Menahem Brinker’s report with a few observations and speculations gleaned from talking …
Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties, by Morris Dickstein. New York: Basic Books. 300 pp. A brief advertisement for “A New Magazine for the 70s” features a cropped photograph of a crowd of young people. Superimposed on this …
