Fall 2025

No Child Left Behind and the Assault on Public Schools

Mitchell Cohen Suzanne Nossel argues well for a “muscular” and restrained foreign policy. I take her point to be that balance, now sorely lacking, is needed badly. I like many of her proposals, especially that for internationalizing the Iraqi situation. …

Faced with genuine and serious threats, George W. Bush’s administration took prompt actions. It curtailed civil liberties, gave new powers to intelligence agencies, enhanced mass surveillance of the American people, made America a less attractive destination for international students, and …

The Bush administration tends to view human rights and security as a zero-sum game. Because the United States faces a serious terrorist threat, it believes that some rights must be restricted. This analysis has some intuitive appeal, but is it …

Whose responsibility are children? In twenty-first-century America, the answer too often is “their parents.” Although politicians and pundits frequently make pious pronouncements calling children “our best hope,” “our future,” and “our nation’s most valuable resource,” mouthing such sentiments is a …

On the Front Lines of Union Organizing

The slanting of intelligence estimates, early plans for the war in Iraq concealed from the Congress and from the secretary of state, internal memos to create a rationale for torture and the abrogation of due process-it would be hard to …

The First Hundred Days of a New Administration

History extends to national administrations confronted by war or national emergency a certain presumption that transgressions against constitutional democracy will be temporary. Anxiety about these trespasses normally fades, with some belated apology, as the crisis itself passes. The examples range …

John Barnard’s American Vanguard: the United Auto Workers During the Reuther Years, 1935-1970, and Jonathan Cutler’s Labor’s Time: Shorter Hours, the UAW, and the Struggle for American Unionism

Is the United States facing a constitutional crisis? We posed the following question to a group of prominent writers and intellectuals who represent a range of political opinion: Many people, as politically diverse as members of the National Rifle Association …

Women and the Expanding Workweek

Living last fall in Sweden, I often felt as if I were in the richest country in the world. In my two months there, I never saw a boarded-up window or dilapidated house. Cell phones were ubiquitous, carried by everyone …

Because no act of terrorism has yet destroyed a liberal democracy but acts of parliament have closed a few, Americans should ask if the new U.S. policies, laws, and practices in reaction to the attacks of September 11, 2001, are …