Michael Tomasky’s comment on the decline in crime rates in America’s cities is a simplistic attempt to blame the left for all that has gone wrong in American politics since the 1960s. Tomasky disingenuously espouses the notion that it was …
Libertarianism: A Primer by David Boaz Free Press, 1997. 314 pp. $23.00. What It Means to Be a Libertarian: A Personal Libertarianism by Charles Murray Broadway Books, 1997. 178 pp. $20.00. Those of us who call ourselves left libertarians feel …
It has been said about Dissent’s editors and writers that we turn to culture only when politics is impossible for us, when the left is defeated or in the doldrums. Cultural criticism is an antidote for, or a diversion from, …
The politics of group interest has had many worthy successes. Identity politics delivers a lot of psychological, legal, and practical goods. So, after a full generation, it has become a sort of tradition. Still, even its defenders concede that there …
In a well-known comment on Napoleon III, Karl Marx wrote that historical figures and events do indeed repeat themselves—“the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” This witticism seems particularly apt here in Jerusalem, where we are now …
“When smart people,” Robert Lekachman once said, “say stupid things, the question arises, why is their perception of reality so blurred?” I recalled Lekachman’s query when reading a recent New York Times article in which Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs claimed …
Ten years ago, I signed my first contract for a book in the middle-grade fiction category—a Bobbsey Twins mystery about sunken treasure. For the treasure, I devised a gold Aztec statuette—priceless, potent, and ruthlessly pilfered. After the Bobbseys cracked the …
Every Saturday morning, as tourists at the Greek Cypriot checkpoint walk past coils of barbed wire into the Turkish-Cypriot–controlled sector of Cyprus, Rita Mantoles is out pleading for help. On a small placard are the testimonies of her grief: faded …
Moscow’s mayor Yury Luzhkov decreed this past spring that the city’s retail outlets would no longer be able to call themselves by such western-inspired names as “supermarket,” “drug store,” or “shop.” As of June 1, businesses in the city were …
Lincoln’s famous call to take up “the unfinished work” of those who fought for the Union drew its power from the way he redefined consecrate. He shifted the meaning of the word from public ceremony enacted by officials to the …
Has Globalization Gone Too Far? by Dani Rodrik. Washington D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1997. 128 pp. $20.95. Mainstream economists are getting a little nervous. The market for their ideas is booming, of course. The neoliberal enterprise—deregulation, privatization, and the …
With the death of Meyer Schapiro in 1996, the art world lost a legendary figure while the rest of us, including the Dissent community, were deprived of a valued colleague, teacher, and model. Schapiro’s life and work touched several different …
The American media have declared war on the working family. A recent cover article in the New York Times Magazine featured an excerpt from Arlie Hochschild’s new book The Time Bind that claimed that Americans want to spend more time …
How successfully has the American labor movement revived since John Sweeney took the reins a year and a half ago? One measure is the return of full-throated labor bashing in our public life. For the past generation or so, attacking …
Despite the highest unemployment rate since 1933, the German central bank has declined to reduce interest rates. To do so, its spokesman asserted, would in no wise affect unemployment. Unemployment is “structural” in origin, it has nothing to do with …
