Justice for Hedgehogs by Ronald Dworkin Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011, 528 pp. Reviewers ought not to begin apologetically. It undermines their credibility. Nonetheless, I feel diffidence in the face of Justice for Hedgehogs. It is an astonishing …
This past spring, Western and Egyptian media alike attributed the explosive Tahrir Square protests to organizing by middle-class movements of students and intellectuals, battling for political freedom and armed with social media. This popular narrative holds that it was only …
Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America by John McMillian Oxford University Press, 2011, 277 pp. Theodore Roszak, in The Making of a Counter Culture, identified the central battle of the sixties as …
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable Viking Adult, 2001, 608 pp. Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention hit the book stands last spring with considerable buzz, given the allure that accompanied Malcolm X’s life story, …
Over the last decade, talk of choice in education has reached an unprecedented pitch, and the talk has brought forth extensive dollars and human energy. Advocates for school choice, which has become a pseudonym for charter school reform, claim that …
Democracy: A Man-Search, a book by Louis Sullivan, was first published fifty years ago, although he wrote it in 1908. The great Chicago architect completed what is a kind of 350-page prose poem at a moment when his career was …
Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership by Lewis Hyde Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010, 306 pp. In 1983, Lewis Hyde published The Gift, a meditation on gift economies where art and ideas escaped the indignity of a market value. …
Every year I teach a class called “Mind, Body, and Bioethics in Japan” to a group of Princeton undergraduates made up of students drawn to ethical dilemmas—aspiring doctors, scientists, and lawyers. The class departs from typical approaches to bioethics. Instead …
The nation’s dropout rate reached crisis levels in 2009, and test scores posted by its poorest public schools were also grim. Only 70 percent of first-year students entering America’s high schools were graduating, with a full 1.2 million students dropping …
If any reform promised to bring about equality of educational opportunity, it was arguably school finance reform. By eliminating the large differences in per-pupil spending among school districts in the same state, it would have leveled the playing field between …
We are living in an age of austerity and, together with most Europeans and the Japanese, will probably have to endure it for some time to come. The truly wretched “compromise” on the debt limit that Barack Obama agreed to …
An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War by J. Hoberman The New Press, 2011, 432 pp. From High Noon to The Ten Commandments, from low-budget horror films like Them! to noir melodramas like Panic …
Let’s start with the numbers. On May 28, an estimated twenty thousand people flooded into downtown Santiago and marched on the presidential palace to protest the HidroAysén project, a plan to build a series of hydroelectric dams on two of …
Who would believe that Albert Shanker, the late, controversial president of the American Federation of Teachers, was one of the original backers of the charter school concept, publicizing the name and idea in his weekly “Where We Stand” column of …
During the last decade, the population of children entering U.S. schools unable to speak English grew by 40 percent. One in ten pre-K–12 students, a total of 5.3 million, are categorized as English Language Learners (ELLs). This large number of …
