Look left today and you will see intellectual crisis. Look first at the mainstream. Social democrats led governments across Europe in recent years. Their talk of a “third way” often displaced social imagination. They rushed to be the “center” instead …
Frances Stonor Saunders’ The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters is a widely discussed retrospective on post—Second World War liberalism that raises important questions about the relationships between intellectuals and political power. Obsessed with …
Much post-9/11 advertising confuses patriotism with consumerism. But using the flag to sell things is an American tradition. While researching the life of my great-grandfather Edward Bellamy, the author of Looking Backward, I came across a noteworthy conflation of patriotic …
The Prose of Adam Zagajewski
In her review of my State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (“A Dearth of Inspiration,” Spring 2002), Daphne Eviatar offers a tough-minded critique of a book she labels “utopian” and out of touch with “political reality.” She …
The China Dream: The Quest for the Last Great Untapped Market on Earth by Joe Studwell and Inequality and Poverty in China in the Age of Globalization by Azizur Rahman Khan and Carl Riskin
From Jack Robin to Bob Dylan
The Anatomy of Racial Inequality by Glenn C. Loury
Hardt, Negri, and Postmodern Political Theory
Travels with Older Feminists
In October 1953, V. S. Naipaul’s father died in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He died in disappointment and misery. He had been waiting to see his son, who was finishing a degree at Oxford, and waiting for his own book …
Ten years have passed since the bloody carnage began in Bosnia, initiated by Serbian nationalist forces led by Slobodan Milosevic. To be sure, the Serbs were not alone. Croatia’s separatists, led by an equally authoritarian former communist general, Franjo Tudjman, …
When Michael Harrington’s The Other America was published in 1962, Larry Moore was in elementary school on the north side of Milwaukee. His parents had moved from the rural south a few years earlier to find work in an African-American …
If a drug-addicted person with a short criminal record of petty street crimes is arrested and convicted for shoplifting and at the same time is also convicted of possessing a few grams of cocaine, that person will likely spend several …
If Nelson Lichtenstein is only arguing that the contemporary labor movement should be bolstered by ideas, then we don’t disagree. As I noted in my review, inspiration is important. But to sustain the union spirit, workers need to see concrete …
