Remembering Irving Howe  

Lucidity may have been Irving Howe’s favorite word, as much in prose as in politics. In a preface to the republication of Politics and the Novel, written shortly before his death, he remarked that nowadays, “when critical writing is marked …













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France: Right Rumbles, Left Wobbles  

This month’s “Manif pour tous” was most obviously against a law called Mariage pour tous (Marriage for All). But something bigger is stirring. Is it, as Le Monde put it, “The Awakening of Reactionary France”?



The Values of Dissent  

Do you remember the proverbial “herd of independent minds”? That was critic Harold Rosenberg’s description, decades ago, of the New York intellectuals. These days some packs are still (alas!) on the left, some on the right, and some run somewhere …