Fall 2025

I write a few days after the election, you will read this some weeks later. By the time you do, there will have appeared endless analyses, ranging from the trivial to the profound. And by the time you reach these …

The United States Supreme Court, pushed to the Right by the four appointments of President Nixon, ended its 1971-72 term last June with a flurry of opinions that did not bode well for the freedom of speech and press clause …

The distinctive feature of what I’ll call here the literary-political mode of analysis is a reliance on personal sensibility, in the literary meaning of that term, as the basic “method” for forming judgments about social and political affairs. Not all …

A good case can be made for calling the last 25 years the Age of Freud, for his thought has reached everywhere, reached especially to a kind of contemporary writing I would like to call—to coin an ungainly phrase—psycho-political prophecy. …

Known for the time being as the “Coalition of Black Trade Unionists,” a new organization has been launched of black trade union leaders and members. It may turn out to be of major significance both in the American labor movement …

American Communism in Crisis, 1943-1957, by Joseph Starobin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 331 pp. For a certain number of persons Joseph Starobin’s book will hold an intense interest. It presents, with authoritative detail and a serious effort at objectivity, the …

It should by now be clear that the fear of crime is a political fact and not merely a code word for racism or backlash to the social turbulence of the 1960s. Beginning with Goldwater in 1964, the hardliners have …

August 1914, the first installment of Solzhenitsyn’s broadly conceived historical trilogy, thus far has had a mixed reception. The publication of the Russian text of the novel in Paris has provided an occasion for another virulent Soviet campaign against its …

William F. Buckley, Jr.—author and editor, lecturer and columnist, one-time mayoral candidate for New York City, and leading publicist for the body of thought that goes by the name of conservatism in America—is an intellectual of a very special kind. …

The Mind of an Activist: James Connolly, by Owen Dudley Edwards. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan. 132 pp. The University of Edinburgh professor who wrote this book considers James Connolly (1868-1916) the most remarkable thinker of Ireland’s most remarkable period. Most …

“The Radicalizing of a Teacher of Literature,” by Ellen Cantarow. Change, May 1972. Though the energies of the radical student movement seem to have ebbed, thousands of “movement people” are still seeking ways to act upon their often valid critique …

By the Check Point We walk past weeping women, we walk, stepping in silence, we don’t dare say a word to them, we can not wave our hands to them, we walk, and on their shoulders— knapsacks of tobacco and …

The old Nixon and the new Nixon are one and the same man: the president of the United States. That is at least one secret of Nixonism. For, alas, it is now necessary to name an ism after a man …

I n the back seat, the coal miner sitting next to me said something about miners’ caps. “No,” said the driver, “we don’t want any miners’ caps at this convention.” He kept his eye on the road; at first you …

Drugs and the Public, by Norman E. Zinberg and John A. Robertson. New York: Simon and Schuster. 288 pp. The Natural Mind: Another Way of Looking at Drugs and the Higher Consciousness, by Andrew Weil. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 229 pp. …