We live in bubble times. The stock market orbits at record highs, apparently bound only by the untested dynamics of the “new economy.” Novel industries sprout like mushrooms, purveying goods and services that most people could hardly imagine a few …
Later Auden by Edward Mendelson Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999, 570 pp., $30 During the 1930s, W. H. Auden populated his poems and plays with heroes struggling to put their shoulders to the wheel of History, and his admirers anointed …
Driving down the gutted gravel roads of Putumayo, you can’t see the war. You could be in any rural tropical region of Latin America— the same wandering cattle that drift onto the road, the same teenage soccer teams in shiny …
Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered by Jack Metzgar Temple University Press, 2000, 264 pp., $22.95 paper On November 7, 1959, bowing to an injunction upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, the United Steelworkers (USW) ended—116 days after it started—one of the …
Just about every aspect of collegiate life can be leased for corporate profit these days. Increasingly, universities subcontract to large companies services they used to provide themselves; on campuses nationwide, corporate logos are becoming as ubiquitous as backpacks, as Barnes …
In recent years, the recognition of gay couples has become a public question in many Western democracies. Approaches differ depending on history, culture, and laws, yet few countries have passed general laws dealing with gay unions. Although French republicanism and …
Last winter, Dissent published a symposium called “Where Will Critical Culture Come From?” Our thinking was organized around an image coined by Jules Feiffer in a 1998 cartoon. He portrayed a man who criticizes New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s policy …
Nothing characterizes the private-sector labor market in the United States more clearly than the ability to fire employees at will. “Sorry, you’re no longer needed here” sounds like the refrain of a classic American song. Those Europeans who oppose the …
Labour wasn’t always a modern, business-friendly party committed to fiscal prudence.
Two shibboleths dominate contemporary discussion about the future of the left in advanced industrial democracies. The first is that globalization is creating a fundamentally new environment for leaders and publics, imposing burdens and constraining choices. The second is that traditional …
Starting in the early 1980s, fashionable opinion held that unfettered free markets, a reduced role for the state, and integration into the global economy provided the best formula for development. International financial institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary …
Kim France wouldn’t blush over her new magazine, Lucky, even if pink cheeks would flatter the posh outfits she adores wearing. As editor-in-chief of the latest craze to hit women’s magazines—a publication devoted solely to shopping–-she proudly asserts that it …
Social democracy has always been a national project, usually with a veneer of internationalist rhetoric and transnational sympathy, but never drifting far from the “national interest.” The year 1914 provided the decisive test in this respect. Nowhere did social democrats …
It’s nap time in America. As I write, in the summer of our content, the nation seems blissfully oblivious of the presidential campaign, and the candidates themselves are doing little to rouse it from its rest. In the case of …
My Love Affair With America: The Cautionary Tale of a Cheerful Conservative by Norman Podhoretz Free Press, 2000, 248 pp., $25 In a recent issue of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz pronounces American Pastoral Philip Roth’s best novel, while confessing his uncertainty …
