Student loans, for more than half those attending college, are the new paradigm of college funding. Consequently, student debt is, or will soon be, the new paradigm of early to middle adult life. Gone are the days when the state …
Whether in agreement or demurral, one reads Michael Walzer with interest and respect. His work is a welcome contrast to the vicious rhetoric of accusation and denunciation that is so much a part of our public life. The basics of …
Soft interventionism in Liberia
Nicolaus Mills compares the impact of Hurricane Katrina to that of the Galveston hurricane of 1900
In the 1980s and early 1990s, one could be forgiven for getting the impression that Germans had a monopoly on self-obsessed debates about their “identity.” When the country was still divided, politicians and intellectuals joined in what seemed to be …
Signs and portents abounded that Good Friday in New Orleans as our group of New York City high school students, parents, and teachers rolled in to spend the spring break doing “relief” work. Lawns and green median strips sprouted campaign …
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
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The bankruptcy filing in October of last year by the Delphi Corporation, the giant auto-parts supplier spun off by General Motors in a 1999 public offering, sent a shock wave across the American labor movement. The slow grinding down of …
Target Zero: A Life in Writing by Eldridge Cleaver
Confronting the political and cultural issues of teaching political theory in China
When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America by Ira Katznelson
On a cold winter afternoon in 1960, my wife and I pored over blueprints in the Grand Street office of the United Housing Federation, a nonprofit foundation created after the war with the support of organized labor to build middle-income …
When I hear professional critics, or my students, bemoan the commodification of art, a wave of irritation engulfs me. Yes, yes, I think, we live in a capitalist society where art, like other things, is bought and sold. This is …
In a rundown, dirt-stained building in El Alto, Bolivia, five young men sit behind a rickety linoleum-topped table on an auditorium stage. A rainbow banner—known locally as the Wiphala, a flag representing half a millennium of indigenous resistance—hangs on the …
