Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson Simon and Shuster, 2010, 357 pp. TWO AND A HALF YEARS AGO, in the midst of economic collapse, it …
I have been to Israel four times: twice as a child, twice as an adult. Each time, I went as a tourist. Among serious Jews, that’s a fairly shameful admission. I have never gone to Israel to study or work. …
If Wittgenstein can end the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus with an invitation to mystical flight, it is not amiss, I hope, to end this issue with the kind of vague-minded musing on human movement for which any scrupulous thinker will mock Michael …
After decades of harsh and unyielding military dictatorship, the political landscape in Myanmar (Burma) shifted in the closing months of 2010 as the first general election in twenty years approached. Key figures in a ruling cabal seldom known to curry …
In a famous essay, the political philosopher Gerry Cohen asked, “If you are an egalitarian, how come you are you so rich?” He pointed out that many professed egalitarians are quite wealthy, yet they devote only a small amount of …
“Why would you want to live in Israel?” Irving Howe asked me, his voice rising in bemusement. It was 1981, and we were at Leo’s Coffee Shop on Madison Avenue near 86th Street. I was two years out of Sarah …
The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s by Richard Wolin Princeton University Press, 2010, 391 pp. IT WOULD BE EASY—and perhaps entertaining—to write a history of Maoism in France that would …
I was raised enough of a Jew to take some things for granted: certain blessings rolling off the tongue; instinctual skepticism of pork chops; good deeds ringing in my mind as “mitzvot”; a general support for Israel. I attended a …
Daniel Bell’s The End of Ideology is one of the Times Literary Supplement’s “100 most influential non-fiction books published since the Second World War.” Bell, who died in late January at the age of ninety-one, never dishonored the intellectual’s motto: …
“Check your Rolex. It’s time for a rebellion.” In the fall of 2010, protesters against the reform of the French pension system lacked neither catchy slogans nor energy. For more than a month, unionists and a variety of left activists …
The U.S. war in Afghanistan started off with rousing optimism in the fall of 2001, but by the end of the decade has devolved into a quagmire for U.S. troops and potential disaster for the Afghan people. For all its …
When you find yourself caught between a “9/11 Truth” banner and the contemplative face of Mumia Abu-Jamal, you may reasonably question your political judgment. And Chambers Street on this contentious September 11, 2010, was awash in the dregs of lefty …
The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History by Samuel Moyn Harvard University Press, 2010 344 pp., $27.95 HUMAN RIGHTS—the rights one holds simply because one is a human being—are a modern idea. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by …
In this second installment of “Party of the Future: Voices from the Millennial Generation,” we have asked a new group of under-thirty authors to talk about relationships—everything from sex to family ties to ordinary friendship. The first set of “Party …
As I walk to the Memorial of Resistance in São Paulo a few days before the election, I wonder whether a revolution is no longer necessary in Brazil. The memorial is symbolically located in what used to be the Department …
