The Situationist City by Simon Sadler MIT Press, 1999, 233 pp., $18.95 paper Guy Debord by Anselm Jappe; translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith; foreword by T. J. Clark University of California Press, 1999, 188 pp., $17.95 paper On November 30, 1994, …
After working as a journalist in Vietnam for two years, the author made her first trip to Cuba in January 2000. She described her impressions to colleagues and friends in the following letter.—Eds. Dear____, Of course I had heard how …
The bastardized curse “may you live in interesting times” has a special poignancy for any organizer living in uninteresting ones. An “interesting time,” for better or worse, is one of upheaval—a period when large movements of ordinary people can create …
Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor by Jefferson Cowie Cornell University Press, 1999, 273 pp., $29.95 Most Americans rarely think about the large structures of political economy. At election time, they are more likely to focus on schools, …
Democracy has been given a second chance in Croatia with a dramatic breakthrough by democratic parties in parliamentary and presidential elections earlier this year. The national-chauvinist HDZ (Croatian Democratic Community) founded by Franjo Tudjman, which has ruled Croatia with an …
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 …
The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy by Nicholas Lemann Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999, 368 pp. In respectable American opinion, perhaps the Constitution is the only institution treated with more obligatory reverence than the elite university. …
Two pedagogical principles seem to pull in opposite directions. On the one hand, proponents of Great Works argue that university students in the social sciences and humanities should be exposed largely, if not exclusively, to the contributions of profound and …
The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo by Noam Chomsky Common Courage Press, 1999, 199 pp $15.95 Early in Noam Chomsky’s diatribe against NATO’s military intervention in Kosovo, he cites George Orwell’s preface to Animal Farm. Orwell discussed the way …
Many western liberals have always mistrusted the Austrian postwar conversion to liberal democracy, and recent political events appear to confirm their wariness. In the last year’s general elections the right-wing populist Freedom Party (FP) won 27 percent of the vote, …
American Beach: How Progress Robbed a Black Town—and Nation—of History, Wealth, and Power by Russ Rymer HarperCollins, 1998 337 pp. $25 cloth $14 paper Russ Rymer has written a powerful book of what C. Wright Mills called “sociological poetry,” escorting …
No one could walk into the now infamous “Sensation” exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (BMA), without having been over saturated by media hype. An unmediated look at the show has became impossible. By the time I walked through …
Considering the mass murder and Nazi-style brutality that engulf so much of the world in the 1990s, it takes chutzpah for an American to say that our collective life contains any trouble at all. Our economy is thriving. It wasn’t …
Those who discuss socialism confront two distinct but not incompatible strategies: the essentialist and the historical. The former, Weber-like, presents socialism as an ideal-type, deduced from the activities or ideas of those identified as socialists. Once the concept is constructed, …
I suspect we all share Marshall Berman’s craving for a “critical culture . . . that struggles actively over how human beings should live and what our life means.” But when he laments “the amazing lack of jaytalking” in contemporary …
