Winter 2025

Robert Kennedy was fond of this quote from Camus: “Perhaps we cannot make this a world in which children are no longer tortured. But at least we can reduce the number of children who are tortured.” In both the United …

It was a little more than 150 years ago that the transition from the feudal order to the democratic nation-state was debated in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt during the German Revolution. Today we have to begin a debate on the …

W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line by Adolph Reed, Jr. Oxford University Press, 1997, 282 pp., $35 W. E. B. Du Bois’s productive use of his ninety-five years on earth casts a …

There may be no more contentious issue in today’s labor movement than union democracy. Almost everybody agrees that members should have the right to elect officers, hold regular meetings, and approve contracts negotiated by their leaders. But not everyone agrees …

As New York’s museums have come to rely on mounting blockbuster exhibitions, the museum going public has grown inured to them. The Impressionists, the great modernists like Picasso and Matisse, and a few postwar New York painters will always draw …

In 1980, I began to keep a file of letters from my father. I don’t remember exactly why I decided to preserve the letters, to treat them as historical documents and not just as his re¬sponses of and for the …

President Clinton and governors across the United States love to tell us that welfare reform is working. Reform is a friendly sounding term for this decade’s explosion of state and federal initiatives that cut welfare benefits, end cash assistance to …