Spring 2025

Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education, by Danielle S. Allen

This Thanksgiving 2006 will witness the anniversary almost to the day ninety-seven years ago, when the immigrant shopgirls of New York’s shirtwaist factories called a general strike. This past April, and then on May Day, immigrant workers, 120 years after …

In March 2003, Newsweek pronounced George W. Bush’s presidency the “most resolutely ‘faith based’ in modern times.” This judgment is plausible enough to merit serious consideration but it is self-evidently true only if modern times began on January 20, 1989, …

In heaven, possibly, ideals speak for themselves. But on earth ideals require translation; they require action. If the world were logically ordered, politics would begin with ends—so Plato and Aristotle would insist. But a little experience demonstrates that the ends …

China did not qualify for the 2006 World Cup, yet there was almost fanatical enthusiasm for the games in Beijing. Because the matches were played in the middle of the night, many Beijingers slept during the day. This gave a …

Al Gore’s global-warming slideshow, An Inconvenient Truth, is now one of the top-grossing documentaries of all time; by the time you are reading this, it’s likely to have settled in at #3, behind Fahrenheit 9/11 and March of the Penguins. …

The relationship between democracy and the economy has always been contested terrain. In Russia, many people, including intellectuals, do not see democracy as important to economic reconstruction. They are unconcerned by President Vladimir Putin’s steady elimination of the content, if …

In 1979, I published a book on the midlife search for self that had in it a chapter titled, “What Am I Going to Do With the Rest of My Life?” Then, I was writing about women who at forty …

As the fourth year of genocidal destruction in the Darfur region of Sudan grinds on, with ever greater numbers of civilians affected by increasingly chaotic conflict, one feature in this obscene episode of mass human destruction is clear: never before …

Government repression in Rwanda.