American mothers are under attack again. The new attack is not like that of the 1950s and 1960s, which faulted stay-at-home mothers for “smother love,” “momism,” and schizophrenogenic behavior that turned their sons psychotic. It is aimed instead at women …
Richard Rothstein’s Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic, and Education Reform to Close the BlackWhite Achievement Gap
Fifty years later, NAACP lawyer Jack Greenberg reflects on Brown v. Board of Education: “Brown went beyond school integration, raising a legal and moral imperative that was influential even when it was not obeyed.”
I take my text from the noted political theorist Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, who said, “When the Supreme Court that hand picks you to be President tells you that you’ve just overstepped your bounds . . . you’ve …
The latest addition to the Mall in Washington, the new National World War II Memorial, is by architectural standards very modest. It deliberately defers to its more famous neighbors, the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. Its plaza, located on …
Has the Bush administration properly balanced security and liberty? Let’s address this question through two routes. 1. When national security is threatened, any nation is likely to reduce liberty in some way. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. During World War …
After September 11, 2001, Dissent published a series of articles that critically assessed traditional left ideas about America and its place in the world. For some time, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein and I have been thinking about undertaking a similar review …
Jason DeParle’s American Dream
The threat of terrorist attacks on the scale of those of September 11, 2001, or worse cannot be denied. That reality calls at a minimum for a reevaluation of the balance between liberty and security. If a diminution in liberty …
Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America
Yes, the Bush administration does pose a serious danger to basic liberties and constitutional democracy. Do the NRA and the ACLU agree on what that threat is? I doubt it. Each organization represents a pole in the partisan battle that …
My article aims to identify a small set of foreign policy initiatives that could be taken in the first few months of a new administration so as to begin to repair the damage to U.S. global standing and influence wrought …
The family house has left the family. Built in 1898, the two-story frame house was sold last fall for far more than I would have guessed and probably more than it was worth. The 1200 block on Carmen Avenue in …
Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society by Michael K. Brown, Martin Carnoy, Elliot Currie, Troy Duster, David B. Oppenheimer, Marjorie M. Shultz, and David Wellman
Vladimir Putin’s Russia is awash in Soviet kitsch. In St. Petersburg’s popular “Idiot” café a bust of Lenin sports a racy polka-dot tie. Trendy eateries with catchy names such as “Propaganda,” “CCCP,” “Soviet Kitsch,” and (no kidding) “Lenin’s Mating Call” …
