When I tell people that I live in my hometown of Rochester, N.Y., their most common response is, “Why?” Rochester is the fifty-first largest metro region in the United States, a tad smaller than Buffalo and a tad bigger than …
Abraham Lincoln: A Life by Michael Burlingame Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008, Volume 1, 942 pp., Volume 2, 1,034 pp. IN 1936, the great Lincoln historian J.G. Randall provocatively asked, “Has the Lincoln theme been exhausted?” At a moment when …
A Home Elsewhere: Reading African American Classics in the Age of Obama by Robert B. Stepto Harvard University Press, 2010, 179 pp., $22.95 THE NOMINATION, election, and inauguration of Barack Obama signified a multiplicity of things to a multitude of …
Nothing feeds jolly bankers and dyspeptic pundits more than a tasty crisis, and this year’s turmoil over the Euro has provided an especially rich diet to critics of state-owned enterprises and public sector social programs. “What we’re seeing in Greece …
In 1960, Paul Goodman—social thinker, activist, poet, and novelist—published his groundbreaking book Growing Up Absurd. An examination of youth disaffection in our affluent but spiritually empty society, Goodman’s work inspired and galvanized a burgeoning generation of sixties students and intellectuals. …
“OUR PUBLIC officials are not much concerned about the ‘waste of human resources’…. But … the big causes of stupidity, of lack of initiative and lack of honorable incentive, are glaring,” noted Paul Goodman—a half-century ago—in Growing Up Absurd. “Our …
I’m still puzzled fifty years later by what it was about the climate and the culture in 1960 that encouraged many young people to think they could make the world over. That was the year when little groups of black …
On June 21, residents of Fremont, a small meatpacking town just outside Omaha, Nebraska, voted by 57 percent to deny work and shelter to undocumented immigrants. Why Fremont, Nebraska, and why now? Some observers, not knowing the Fremont measure was …
In general, I’m not a big fan of leaders in Latin America eliminating or loosening term limits so that they can stay in office longer. I also believe that recent processes of constitutional reform in many Latin American countries have …
More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City by William Julius Wilson W.W. Norton, 2009, 190 pp., $24.95 The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today by Andrew J. Cherlin Knopf, 2009, …
Hitch 22: A Memoir by Christopher Hitchens Twelve/Hachette Book Group, 2010 448 pp., $26.99 HAS THERE ever been anyone quite like Christopher Hitchens? As a writer and a thinker, Hitchens may be the greatest performance artist the profession has ever …
“DON’T FORGET your cape,” my brother gibed on the phone. “Will the workshops be at night?” a colleague chortled. “Is this like a Star Trek convention?” asked a bewildered friend as I prepared to leave for the biannual conference devoted …
Minnesota was long known as a progressive stronghold, from its support for Ignatius Donnelly and the Populists of the 1890s and A.C. Townley and his Nonpartisan League in the First World War era to its election of Farmer-Labor governors, senators, …
The Privileges by Jonathan Dee Random House, 2010, 272 pp., $25 AFTER THE fall of 2008, when the American economy revealed itself to have been a particularly elaborate house of cards, after the astonishment and the rage and the losses …
An old conservative-minded contention goes something like this: if you start with an egalitarian ethos, you will bottom out at complete leveling. It’s a slippery slope to the end of individuality. This was not simply a social or economic claim. …
