The film Thirteen Days, which deals with the Cuban missile crisis, reminds us that the danger of global nuclear annihilation does not come, mainly, from irrational adversaries and rogue states. Instead, the main threat stems from the policies and behaviors …
America needs “values.” That is the conservative harangue. But to think about values? That’s something else. They get away with sanctimony. Do I exaggerate? Return (O return!) to our “Constitution and Absolute Truth,” urges Tom DeLay, House Majority Whip. Truth …
In 1997, Arthur Levine, the president of Columbia University’s Teachers College, concluded a five-year national study of undergraduate attitudes about higher education. The study was like a cold shower, one made all the more jarring by the fact that Levine …
Madison, Wisconsin, 1969: Late that spring, after the largest antiwar marches and the student strike that brought out the national guard, the graduate teaching assistants at the University of Wisconsin made labor history. They voted in favor of union representation, …
Sometimes the essence of a societal moment is well captured by an individual artist. Such is the case for German photographer Andreas Gursky, whose work—displayed this spring in his first retrospective (1984-2000) at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)—captures …
Surely, a sector of the Inferno is reserved for bureaucrats. Bound together with unburnable paper chains, they shuffle along, hopeless, exhausted, in an endless, hell-girdling queue with neither head nor tail. Unworthy of Satan’s attention, their computerized torments are inflicted …
Siegfried Kracauer: An Introduction by Gertrud Koch, translated by Jeremy Gaines Princeton University Press, 2000, 137 pp., $14.95 Sometime in the early 1990s, while I was a graduate student in Germany, I stumbled across a small paperback at one of …
The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History (MAAH), which opened in Detroit in April 1997, has been acclaimed as the nation’s most important black history museum in numerous descriptive accounts, but, with a few notable exceptions, has not …
ATTORNEY GENERAL A. Mitchell Palmer had barely begun his roundup of foreign born radicals when alumni of the Greenwich Village “Little Renaissance” of the 1910s began to write the movement’s epitaph. Waldo Frank’s Our America (1919) set the tone for …
On the night of Manny Babbitt’s execution at San Quentin, Naomi White had a bad fall. Somewhere along the gravel path leading away from the prison, her ankle buckled and she tumbled face forward in the darkness. Her husband, Derrel …
Ruy Teixeira and I are in substantial agreement on many of the forces at work in contemporary politics—particularly on the central role of white, working-class voters in recent elections and the necessity of having an effective plan for promoting economic …
Defined simply as overt public bigotry, racism in the United States has fallen to an all-time low. Understood in socioeconomic, political, and institutional terms, however, American racism is as alive as ever. More than thirty years after the heroic victories …
What a difference fourteen days can make. On May 13, the center-left coalition that had governed Italy since 1996 lost control of both houses of Parliament to the center-right coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi. Journalists everywhere have already catalogued the …
Although Thomas Byrne Edsall’s review of my and Joel Rogers’s America’s Forgotten Majority is both thoughtful and perceptive (“Why Class Doesn’t Trump Culture,” Dissent, Spring 2001), some of his points aren’t quite fair to the book. Further, I disagree with …
As he accepted the 1996 Republican presidential nomination, Bob Dole, one of the Senate’s toughest infighters for more than a decade, cautioned his supporters that President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore were “opponents, not enemies.” Dole’s words of …
