The debate about the state of film criticism has settled—or calcified—into two camps: traditional print critics claim the Internet has replaced expertise with amateurs, fanboys, and obscurantists. Web enthusiasts counter that we’re in a new golden age of film criticism …
Many observers of European politics warn that democracy on the continent is in peril. Conservative authors argue that European governments are threatened by a spineless surrender to “Islamofascism,” while liberals fret that Europe is being overtaken by “ghosts of a …
At this moment (May Day!), the outcome of the uprisings across the Arab world is radically uncertain. The massive demonstrations and the early successes in Tunisia and Egypt were exhilarating, and the courage of the Syrian demonstrators is inspiring—even though …
It’s been a tough year to be a teacher, especially a unionized one. Popular opinion holds that unions protect bad teachers at the cost of poor kids’ education. If only we teachers would stop being lazy and complacent, American students …
Four years ago I began going to Little Lina, a hamlet of fifty households a few hours’ trek from the nearest road winding through the Chinese Himalaya. My aim was to find out how grand ideas about poverty alleviation and …
My amiable but ever preening friend Resaka had already warned me about the March 8 International Women’s Day holiday. He insisted it was less an opportunity for mothers, sisters, and daughters to assert their worth during their twenty-four-hour public platform …
We are grateful for the historical and constitutional perspective that William Galston brings to his stimulating response. He does not dispute our charge that the present regime of religious accommodation rests on philosophically unsound arguments. Instead, he says this is …
When Mark Twain published The Innocents Abroad in 1869, he had in mind entertaining his readers with a travel book about a group of naïve Americans who make a pleasure trip to Europe and the Middle East aboard the steamship …
Controversy in the summer and fall of 2010 over plans for the construction of an Islamic community center in New York City near Ground Zero reminds us that America’s legacy of religious freedom is by no means settled. Debates about …
You wish that people who want to challenge your work would reach out, send an e-mail, or pick up the phone. I get many such e-mails. The result is often learning for me, for my interlocutor, and for both of …
I am shocked, shocked, and in a tizzy, about demands from Wisconsin Republicans to read the e-mail of faculty members at the state university. Can they do that? Can Republicans in my state demand to read my e-mail? I am …
In his oft-quoted Fifth Report to the Massachusetts Board of Education (1841), Horace Mann sought to popularize the idea that education had individual as well as collective economic benefits. This report became one of the most well-known of Mann’s twelve …
For decades after it came out in 1925, Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, portraying an episode in the first Russian Revolution of 1905, was commonly described as the greatest film of all time. Even at the height of the Cold War, …
Years ago, in 1983, I published a book called Spheres of Justice, which was an attempt to give an account of distributive justice in domestic society. I said virtually nothing in that book about distributive justice in international society. Since …
If you look at recent academic discussions about the good and bad energies brought into play by patriotism, you are struck by a certain elusiveness regarding the commitment of the commentators. Patriotism, the love of our country, is sometimes presented …
