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 …
Notes from the New Rural Landscape
Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-first Century by Peter Dreier, John Mollenkopf, and Todd Swanstrom University Press of Kansas, 2001, 349 pp., $15.95 Here is a simple but important fact: approximately three-quarters of Americans live in metropolitan areas. Of these, …
It is very dangerous to teach religion in the wrong way. In order to achieve progress, you have to teach religion in its proper form. —Mehmet Nuri Yilmaz, head of Turkey’s Religious Affairs Administration In our opinion the people who …
Around the world, right now, leftists of all sorts are engaged in arguments about the use of force. In our last issue, we focused on the question of humanitarian intervention, and all our writers, though they were a very diverse …
In the days and weeks after September 11, many Americans talked of a nation pulling together, of a people unified in horror at the terrorists’ slaughter of so many innocent lives and unified in support of our national effort to …
Left in the Dark: Film Reviews and Essays, 1988-2001 by Stuart Klawans Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2002, 340 pp., $15.95 Around a decade ago, the Nation started publishing a movie critic who not only displayed the brains, sensitivity, social conscience, …
A certain kind of leftist just can’t help blaming American imperialism for September 11. In the search for “root causes,” their instinct to designate the United States as villain overwhelms their spirit of critical inquiry. Overlooking the perpetrators’ frank expressions …
Raphael Lemkin, a Polish jurist who lost forty-nine members of his family in the Holocaust, invented the word “genocide” in 1944 because he believed that, in the aftermath of the Turkish “race murder” of the Armenians and of Hitler’s extermination …
State of the Union: A Century of American Labor by Nelson Lichtenstein Princeton University Press, 2002, 336 pp., $29.95 Longtime labor supporters may remember the Joe Hill ballads or Ralph Chaplin’s anthem “Solidarity Forever,” but years ago, the unions stopped …
Early every Sunday morning, Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo, the winner of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize, held Mass in the garden of his residence in the East Timorese capital, Dili. The day before the referendum on independence from Indonesia, …
Politics is about ends and means—about the values that we pursue and the methods by which we pursue them. In a perfect world, there would be a perfect congruence between ends and means: our ends would always be achievable through …
In early October 2001, grief still gripped much of the nation. Anthrax-laced letters kept the public, as well as media, in a state of acute anxiety. In this tense atmosphere, the U.S. government quietly changed its policy governing the Freedom …
