Edward wasn’t doing his work. I had given the twelfth graders in my summer school class the following writing assignment: “Have you ever done something that you regretted or that made you feel guilty?” We were reading John Knowles’s A …
The editors’ question about how intellectuals should “participate in American politics” highlights (for me, at least) how the meaning of the word “intellectual” has expanded since 1952, when the editors of Partisan Review organized the famous symposium that has inspired …
What has happened to Craig Becker illustrates why progressives are disappointed by the first year of the Obama administration—and why they should not stop supporting it. A year ago, Obama nominated Becker, a distinguished lawyer who has worked for the …
How does a young acolyte of the secular Left find his way to divinity school? There are times when, walking to my “Introduction to the New Testament” class in the cold Chicago morning, I ask myself that question. Part of …
The Invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo Sand, trans Yael Lotan Verso, 2009, 332 pp., $34.95 Everyone has heard of Attila and his Huns, who fought their way on pony back from the northern borders of China to the …
Michelle Rhee, the school chancellor of the District of Columbia Public School System (DCPS), is standing behind me in the ladies room of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. I start to sweat. I feel as if I’m standing …
Progressives have wailed against “market fundamentalism for the last quarter-century. They complain that conservatives want to eliminate the government and leave everything to the market. This is nonsense. The Right has every bit as much interest in government involvement in …
Come to Perth next year and give us a keynote address. That was the gist of an e-mail I got one July day in 2008 from the Australian Society for the Study of Labor History. At the time, both the …
Let’s not make this easy. Early in the morning of March 3, 1992, after a long discussion of their racial resentments, John Ayers and Sean Riley set out from their suburban neighborhood of Silver Spring, Maryland, looking for black people …
Sixty years ago, in The New Men of Power, C. Wright Mills made a perceptive observation about the troubled relationship between labor leaders and radical intellectuals during an era of cold war militarism and conservative advance. Wrote Mills: To have …
Keynes: The Return of the Master by Robert Skidelsky Public Affairs, 2009, 256 pp., $25.95 Keynes: The Rise, Fall, and Return of the 20th Century’s Most Influential Economist by Peter Clarke Bloomsbury, 2009, 211 pp., $20 A fierce debate raged …
The United States has been fighting the war in Afghanistan for more than eight years. That’s longer than U.S. participation in the Second World War or the Iraq War. By the end of 2010, it will have surpassed the length …
It has been more than a year since I sat with my older brother at my father’s side, watching him slowly succumb to pancreatic cancer. At the age of seventy-two, James Bevel had seen and experienced more than most men. …
I doubt there is a “should” here anywhere. How one responds to the first query will turn, in part, on whom one places within the category “American intellectuals.” For the sake of this discussion, let’s assume that those who make …
Richard Nixon showed that there really are second (and third) acts in American life, but Congress didn’t get the memo, and so Jean Montrevil may be denied his own American Dream. A Haitian citizen who came to the United States …
