“When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done,” John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1936. A half century later, Keynes’s fear seems just as warranted as …
Everyone remembers the first time he or she heard Michael Harrington speak. Mine was sometime in the early seventies in a drab room at the Catholic Worker house on the Lower East Side. I didn’t know Mike’s history with the …
More insidiously than any other decade in our history, the 1980s have delivered unto us (and into our homes) the promises of past futurists: sit back, relax, and let your fingers do the walking across the universe of simulated experience. …
Where did he get the energy? Apart from his amazing productivity and range of activities, he even looked energetic, like a light bulb. Not having been among his personal friends, I have no intimate insight into this mystery. I observed …
In 1955 Mike came up to Brandeis to confer with the ten members of the progressive political club. There was plenty of left-minded political passion on the campus, but few saw hope for active politics in those Eisenhower years. Mike …
Last year, at about the time a young black man was killed on the streets of Bensonhurst, Cardinal Glemp, the Roman Catholic primate of Poland, abrogated an agreement to relocate a convent from the site of Auschwitz. Aside from being …
I didn’t know Michael Harrington personally, but in the public man I felt I had a special and elegant friend. First and last, I admired the lucid power and moral clarity of his prose, a legacy that will endure beyond …
The following dialogue between Abraham Brumberg and Irving Howe took place in early October 1989. Abraham Brumberg is a widely published authority on Soviet and Eastern European affairs and editor of the forthcoming Perestroika: Chronicle of a Revolution, published by …
Income inequality in the United States is growing with alarming speed. The biggest beneficiaries of this trend are those who least need it, the super-rich, while the most severe victims are those who can least afford it, children. As Leonard …
The passions unleashed by Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses seem at first glance to be a perfect example of what the novel itself identifies as postmodern sensibility, that of a society capable only of pastiche, which cultivates “the image instead …
The rich diversity of American fiction has always made newness difficult to characterize. But the 1980s have seen not only the arrival of fresh work by writers who have long established that diversity, but also the fracturing of literary culture …
Day of Reckoning by Benjamin Friedman Random House, 1988, 323 pp., $19.95 The polls tell us that worship of laissez-faire is on the wane. Collapsing bridges, the Savings and Loan swindles, rising homelessness, the antics of Leona Helmsley and Ivan …
It took all of Ronald Reagan’s eight years. But it now appears that he achieved one of his major goals: hastening an end to the Second Reconstruction in America. Reagan not only succeeded in reducing the protection of specific laws; …
Self-Consciousness: Memoirs by John Updike Knopf, 1989, 257 pp., $18.95 A chapter from John Updike’s Self Consciousness ran some months ago in Commentary under the provocative title, “On Not Being a Dove.” Updike looked back at the loneliness that overtook …
Gavril Popov is a distinguished Soviet economist, editor of the prestigious monthly Voprosy ekonomiki, and a leading proponent of radical political and economic reforms in the USSR. Elected deputy to the Congress of People’s Deputies in March of 1989. Popov …
