There may have been a day when American intellectuals had the luxury of thumbing their noses at pop culture: magazines and journals devoted to serious reflection enjoyed healthy circulations; weighty thinkers won notice for their big ideas rather than their …
In the summer of 2008, I went to work as a volunteer for the Obama campaign in my hometown of Gainesville, Georgia. To my and everyone’s surprise, the campaign had hired a field organizer for Gainesville, a nineteen-year-old Jewish student …
There is a small fortune to be made writing about the young. Neil Howe and the late William Strauss showed that in 1991 with their bestselling Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069, and since then, Howe and …
Finally, the atrocity of gendercide—the murder and mutilation of victims selected by sex—is getting prominent attention in the press. Through feminist online activism, but more prominently through the efforts of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof (in his new book …
The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement by Miriam Pawel Bloomsbury Press, 2009, 384 pp., $28 In 1978, just after I graduated from college, I worked at a migrant health clinic in …
Growing up in the Bronx, I realized early on that this wasn’t a place for me. In the Bronx you witness many things you shouldn’t have to see. You have to be street smart and quick on your feet so …
The U.S. announcement that it would reopen direct contacts with Burma/Myanmar’s military government promises a welcome change from a failed policy of twenty years of isolation and sanctions. Burma/Myanmar has a singularly Manichean politics, as indicated by its dual name: …
In 1980, Ronald Reagan’s election brought the New Right to Washington. For feminists, it was the culmination of a series of devastating setbacks. The new administration gave the green light to an anti-feminist agenda that the Moral Majority, the Hyde …
I flew to post–Hurricane Katrina New Orleans on July 1, 2006, one week after my eighteenth birthday, where, except for a few weeks of visits home, I would live for the next eight months. I thought I was going to …
The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education by Diane Ravitch Basic Books, 2010, 288 pp., $26.95 It’s fall 2007. Diane Ravitch is packing a career’s worth of reading and writing …
On April 2, 2005, a month-and-a half after arriving in Iraq, I was in combat for the first time. We were pounded with mortars, rockets, grenades, vehicle-borne explosives, and small-arms fire for nearly two hours. After the fighting stopped, I …
The announcement by Barack Obama of the surge in U.S. troop deployment to Afghanistan—from a two-thousand-strong force in 2001 to one hundred thousand troops sometime this year—came bundled with a provision for a quick drawdown starting in July 2011. The …
To sit in your dorm room and believe you can change the world may be a certain kind of American collegiate tradition, akin to tailgating at Homecoming, taking Bob Marley seriously, and holding your roommate’s head over the toilet bowl …
I count myself among those disappointed in Barack Obama’s presidency so far. I had not expected miracles, but I had hoped for a more dramatic turnaround in our politics: for an end to the war in Afghanistan; a rapid closing …
Hello, America. I am the lowercase “g.” After the holidays, I am usually a happy sort. Congress returns from vacation, and my humble, seventh-place self is thrust back into the spotlight by the reintroduction into the national debate of words …
