Winter 2023

Tocqueville is a writer of immense emotional power, and the secret of that power lies in the poetic rhythms of his prose; and, in the whole of Democracy in America, no chapter offers a clearer or more vivid demonstration of …

The question seems to me wrongly put in one aspect. To hurl curses and insults at the Bush administration is a worthy, right, and just thing to do; and yet there is no reason to trip all over ourselves in …

This past November, the Cuban poet and journalist Raúl Rivero made what I believe was his first public appearance in New York City. Rivero was for awhile a leading journalist of the Cuban state—the Moscow correspondent during the 1970s for …

Susan Sontag, who died in December at age seventy-one, was a brave intellectual; but her bravery was not just intellectual. In 1989, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sentenced Salman Rushdie and his publishers to death, a great many people all over …

A friend leaned across a bar and said, “You call the war in Iraq an antifascist war. You even call it a left-wing war-a war of liberation. That language of yours! And yet, on the left, not too many people …

What were my expectations for Eastern and Central Europe ten years ago? I did have my hopes. They were vast. I was hoping, a little wistfully, to see a new kind of society arise—a society with socialist values and libertarian …