Barack Obama’s election marked a significant step in what black Americans call the long road to freedom. A survey conducted after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 revealed that 82 percent of blacks believed they were “unlikely to soon achieve racial equality.” …
Birthright programs that send ethnic youth back to their “motherland” are never simply about roots or where their ancestors came from. Rather, the programs are about giving birth, both in the metaphorical and literal senses, to feelings of connectedness with …
Out to Lunch Editors: I was struck by the Spring issue dedicated to “Food,” where there were seven articles but not one that addressed the subject of food and hunger or poverty. This extraordinary omission, especially for a leading periodical …
Marx’s understanding of love tells us a lot about his interpretation of capital.
WHY is Ron Paul so popular? His moment as a serious presidential contender has come and gone, but in 2012 the twelve-term libertarian congressman from Texas put in his best showing yet during the Republican primaries, emerging as a crowd-pleasing …
Each generational wave of environmental concern seems to lap at Wendell Berry’s doorstep. He gave up teaching and writing in New York in the sixties to return to Kentucky, establishing a small farm at Lanes Landing near Port Royal, and …
Americans are in the midst of a food-consciousness revival: on television, in the mouth of the First Lady, in endless articles celebrating urban agriculture can be found a sudden enthusiasm for the politically and, perhaps, spiritually curated dinner table. In …
For the last decade and more, a generation of self-proclaimed “ed reformers” has been setting up programs to show the power of competition and market-style accountability to transform inner-city public schools. Ed reformers spend at least a half-billion dollars a year in private money…
Fighting for Our Health: The Epic Battle to Make Health Care a Right in the United States by Richard Kirsch Rockefeller Institute Press, 2012, 416 pp. Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar American Struggle Over Health Care Reform by Paul Starr …
Some people work in restaurants as a lifestyle choice: they love the fast pace, the quick jokes, the often easy-flowing booze. At the height of a busy shift, if everything’s going right, a team of skilled cooks and waiters can …
Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber Melville House, 2011, 554 pp. As recently as a year ago, the anthropologist David Graeber was well respected within his academic discipline but little-known outside of it. His sole brush with public …
Alinsky’s Ghost Editors: Nelson Lichtenstein’s otherwise excellent review of Frank Bardacke’s otherwise extraordinary book on Cesar Chavez and the farm workers union (Winter 2012) repeats Bardacke’s misreading of Saul Alinsky’s ideas about organizers and leaders and the relationship of each …
On September 24, 2011, Michael Kazin published an important essay in the New York Times, “Whatever Happened to the American Left?” In it he examined the “populist left’s” historic role in shaping politics and policy discussions in the United States, …
Progressives have forgotten how to think about the constitutional dimensions of economic life. Work, livelihood, and opportunity; material security and insecurity; poverty and dependency; union organizing, collective bargaining, and workplace democracy: for generations of American reformers, the constitutional importance of …
In January 2010, I met a Bulgarian friend for dinner in a Georgetown pizza parlor. This friend, whom I will call Svetozara, had recently immigrated to the United States and was looking for a job in D.C. Recently divorced after …
