What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France by Mary Louise Roberts University of Chicago Press, 2013, 368 pp. The title of Mary Louise Roberts’s new book, What Soldiers Do, says it all: sexual abuses …
Since losing the 2010 general election in the United Kingdom, Labour has struggled to develop a forceful alternative to the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition’s program for eliminating the public deficit through sweeping and sustained cuts in public spending. Labour’s current difficulties …
Last spring the rights of same-sex couples gained recognition in a number of places throughout the world. In the United States, three states—Delaware, Minnesota, and Rhode Island—legalized same-sex marriage, while supreme courts in two heavyweights on the international scene, Brazil …
Despite widespread economic problems and suffering, there has been no upsurge in support for the European left. The articles in this section examine left parties’ current attempts to deal with these challenges.
Now so familiar as to risk seeming clichéd, “We Shall Overcome” was the paramount song of the civil rights movement. “Deep in my heart, I do believe that we shall overcome some day”: the song spoke to a generation’s idealism, …
Henry Wallace’s 1948 Presidential Campaign and the Future of Postwar Liberalism by Thomas W. Devine University of North Carolina Press, 2013, 408 pp. Henry A. Wallace’s campaign for the presidency in 1948, amid the intense political battles of the immediate …
When Alexis Tsipras went to vote on June 17, 2012, television channels from all over the world gathered around the school auditorium where he was casting his ballot. Someone unfamiliar with Greek politics might have supposed that this blaze of …
I’m sometimes asked if Florida is in the South. Well, it’s a big state, I’ll usually say, and regional boundaries are never well defined. This summer, though, the headlines suggested some new reasons to answer the question in the affirmative. …
It is no longer clear that social democracy possesses a coherent and compelling political identity. But it is clear that social democracy has one important thing going for it: the serious commitment to democracy.
In River of Dark Dreams, Walter Johnson draws on slave narratives and planter magazines that the slave order was riven by contradictions and headed for a crisis. At a certain point, the desperate lurches of the slaveholders, the intense longings of the enslaved, and the increasing boldness of abolitionists, both black and white, had to lead to a steamboat-style explosion, whatever the precise political conjuncture.
Perhaps climate change had once seemed too large-scale, or too abstract, for the minutely human landscape of fiction. But the threat seems to have become too pressing to ignore, and less abstract, thanks to a nonstop succession of mega-storms and record-shattering temperatures. Several new novels make climate change central to their plot and setting, appropriating time-honored narratives to accord with our new knowledge and fears.
In late October 2012, twenty-one activists calling themselves “No Dash for Gas” scrambled up a power station to hold a sit-in three hundred feet up in the sky. Their actions put them at risk of becoming the first British climate activists to be sent to jail. It also revealed troubling collusion between energy companies and the police.
The original conceit of the Up documentaries was that the class into which children were born would determine their success in life. Director Michael Apted has long since abandoned class as an overarching theme, but his later films still show how the socioeconomic circumstances in which the Up children were born and raised plainly affected their opportunities.
To be stripped of one’s citizenship rights is to be consigned to a ghetto of one. But it’s not just fascists and dictators who engage in such practices. As historian Patrick Weil notes, the United States has frequently revoked the citizenship of Americans, too.
Sergio De La Pava’s A Naked Singularity is a vindication of the novel as a medium that allows time and space to serious considerations about how we organize our society and how we organize our lives. In the past thirty years our art has grown less serious and our politics more cruel. It has taken a novel of the artistic ambition and moral seriousness of A Naked Singularity to show us why this is no coincidence at all.
