Spring 2025

Dissent in the Twenty-first Century

“God,” said Tolstoy, “is the name of my desire.” This remarkable sentence could haunt one a lifetime, it reverberates in so many directions. Tolstoy may have intended partial assent to the idea that, life being insupportable without some straining toward …

This issue marks the fiftieth anniversary of our magazine. We plan a number of events in the coming year to celebrate, even if the political environment is uncongenial to elation. It prompts dissent instead. Our main event remains the ideas …

Despite popular impressions and dinner-table gossip, the problems of our schools, and above all of “school reform,” are not the result of unions. I speak in part from personal experience over the past thirty-five years in New York City and …

Latin American Intellectuals and the Economy

Shortly after he became the first general secretary of the World Trade Organization, Renato Ruggiero observed, “We are no longer writing the rules of interaction among separate national economies. We are writing the constitution of a single global economy.” The …

I met Volodia Teitelboin today, and he told me General Prats had resigned. He was replaced by the chief-of-staff. General Pinochet? That’s right. Volodia thinks the change will strengthen the government and ward off the threat of a coup. He …

Teaching Humanities to the Poor

Changing the Powers That Be, How the Left Can Stop Losing and Win by William Domhoff

The Republican governor of Alabama, Bob Riley, stunned conservatives last year by pushing through the state legislature a tax reform plan that offered tax relief to the poorest in his state while significantly increasing the burden borne by wealthy individuals …

In the fall of 2001 a slight book with a stern title, Call to Order: Investigation Concerning the New Reactionaries, sent minor shock waves throughout Parisian intellectual circles. The book’s author was Daniel Lindenberg, a historian and frequent contributor to …

When I was fourteen and fifteen, I used to ride my bike three miles to a bookshop run by people whom I thought of vaguely as beatniks. The owner was a man in his late twenties, dark-haired, bearded, scholastically gaunt. …

Though full-length documentary films go back to the work of Robert Flaherty in the 1920s (Nanook of the North, Man of Aran), they have always been the uncommercial stepchild of movies that tell made-up stories. In their marginal way, documentaries …

Naguib Mahfouz in the Life of an Israeli Friend