The collapse of the credit markets over the last year has hit more than just the homebuilding and mortgage sectors of the economy. As interest rates increased, private equity, or “PE,” an important new form of financial capital, was also …
Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski.
It was a drug deal gone bad. Two white men from the suburbs drive to Harlem one night to buy cocaine. There’s a hassle, a shot, and one of them ends up dead. The judge in the state criminal court …
When I worked as a regular newspaper columnist, I absorbed two informal, folkloric strictures on subject matter: No columns based on conversations with cab drivers and none touting jury service as a magisterium of democracy, where one’s faith in the …
About ten years ago, a close friend came to visit me in Hong Kong. This friend—now director of a center for ethics at a prestigious American university—seemed surprised when informed that my family had hired a live-in domestic helper to …
Fire and flood. We call them natural disasters, but a closer look suggests a human hand at work as well. Three years before Katrina hit the gulf coast, Mike Parker, the former head of the Army Corps of Engineers, warned …
A determined offensive is underway. Its target is in the Middle East, and it is an old target: the legitimacy of Israel. Hezbollah and Hamas are not the protagonists, the contested terrains are not the Galilee and southern Lebanon or …
Joanne Barkan, Paul Berman, Susan Cheever, Nicolaus Mills, Maxine Phillips, Ruth Rosen, Jim Sleeper, Michael Walzer, and Darryl Lorrenzo Wellington report from the field.
The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why by Jabari Asim, and Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word by Randall Kennedy.
Right wingers love Friedrich Hayek. The Austrian-British economist is revered by true believers at the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the National Review, and the Weekly Standard. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher cited his ideas as central to the …
In the gloomy days after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, a delegation of intellectuals from the United States came to Jerusalem. There were no visitors in Israel at the time, and they were perhaps the first to arrive. It was …
Are there dumb laws of nature? This reasonable question occurred to me some years back after I heard an eminent economist explain why automakers ought not to be compelled to install seat belts. Yes, it is safer to wear them, …
Katha Pollitt’s Learning to Drive.
Years later, I would tell my friends never to shirk their jury summonses. This is the most democratic experience you’ll ever have, I’d insist. But when I first arrived at the Alameda County Superior Courthouse, located in what was the …
Music was an essential—probably the essential—art form of the 1960s. In a way that’s hard for anyone who didn’t live through the decade to grasp, music once reached deep into every facet of existence, from politics to fashion. It seemed …
