As the new Times Square takes shape, this is a good time to think about what’s special about it, the ways in which we love it and hate it and love to hate it. Since the completion and convergence of …
I have observed, in the course of my reporting on New York City politics in recent years, the odd phenomenon of liberal Democrats muttering in vague opposition to the fantastic decreases in the city’s crime rate. This is not done …
Elliott Currie is a criminologist, and I’m a journalist, so I feel no shame in confessing that he knows more about criminology than I do. I’m happy to hear of my “straw men” that there are “fewer of them all …
Nearly twenty-five years ago I published in Dissent (Winter 1974) a theory of a left/right rhythm in democratic politics—a rhythm that over time produces a leftward drift because conservative administrations on returning to power tend not to reverse the reforms …
Michael Tomasky has some good points, but he takes them much too far. The good points are that communities deserve a high level of public safety, that police are probably more capable of helping to provide it than some people …
In 1908, in Paris, Emile Durkheim and Charles Mathieu Limousin debated which was the supreme social science: economics or sociology? In the course of the debate, Durkheim challenged the immutability of economic laws. “The value of things,” he said, “in …
Still the Promised City?: African-Americans and New Immigrants in Postindustrial New York by Roger Waldinger. Harvard University Press: 1996. 374 pp. $35.00. Last January a report by New York’s Department of City Planning verified what most New Yorkers already knew: …
I agree with Michael Tomasky that public safety is an essential public good, that there is no good reason for the left to cede to the right the law-and-order issue, that poor people have a special need for effective law …
Modern democracy has long drawn much of its moral energy from the idea of a career open to talents, an idea that depends on a shared conception of merit. I take it that merit is always in one sense a …
It used to be, as the New York Times has nostalgically pointed out, that our monuments came in three easy-to-choose styles. There was Egyptian obelisk (the Washington Monument), traditional classic (the Jefferson Memorial), and standard equestrian (St. Gaudens’s William Tecumseh …
Attracted by the appeal of living in the United States as a comfortable member of the community and driven by threats to make legal residency an insecure status, the number of immigrants who have been turning themselves into U.S. citizens …
Of the two Jewish movements that celebrate their centenaries this year—Zionism and the Bund—the first, founded at a glittering ceremony in Basle, Switzerland, in August 1897, can surely boast of greater historical achievements than its coeval, formed by thirteen representatives …
Once upon a time there was a very poor country, tucked away on the Adriatic Sea, called Albania. Many people assumed it was poor because it had been a hard-core communist country, depending on government to regulate corruption and economic …
“All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor,” Walt Whitman wrote in 1855. Allen Ginsberg, who was candid about his faults and about much else, died a beloved and forgiven poet. To be sure, there are those …
American discussions of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have been distorted by two inter-related developments: (1) attempts by some of the most vocal supporters and critics of Clinton’s approach to China, as well as the mainstream media covering their …
