Spring 2025

I wonder how we incorporate the images we receive through the media. Do we take them as fact, believe what we see? Or if not, how do we use what we don’t literally believe? The question is raised in new …

The land around the Fernald uranium processing plant in southwestern Ohio is rich enough to grow most anything. But for the plant’s neighbors the standing joke is that pumpkins are the crop to raise: “They don’t need a candle at …

The present crisis in Hungary was preceded by an unusually long period of tranquility. We should first examine the roots of this exceptional political stability lasting over a quarter of a century. We have to start by stating a historical …

Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980 was in part the result of Jimmy Carter’s failure to respond to high unemployment and inflation. Carter’s austerity program (in 1979, when millions of people were without work, Carter proposed a $25 billion cut in …

One good reason to read this book is that it directly addresses the current right-wing attack on university attempts to modernize their course offerings. As the New York Times reported on November 22, 1988, that attack is spearheaded by complaints …

You might say that my first encounter with Joe Clark was not entirely friendly. He was speaking at a Communist rally in the Bronx, and several young Socialists, I among them, went with the intention of heckling. We tried, but …

When people on the political right talk about education, they immediately start talking about truth. Typically, they enumerate what they take to be familiar and self-evident truths and regret that these are no longer being inculcated in the young. When …

We are today on the rising slope of a third technological revolution. It is a rising slope, for we have passed from the plus-minus stage of invention and innovation into the crucial period of diffusion. The rates of diffusion will …

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” This famous line, spoken by O’Brien to the battered Winston Smith in Orwell’s 1984, embodies the fear so many felt in the aftermath of …

When Charles Murray’s attack on the welfare system, Losing Ground, was published in 1984, it drew a great deal of attention. With the conservative Manhattan Institute bankrolling an artful public relations campaign, Murray and his ideas were soon being widely …

The “leveraged buyout,” dramatized last fall by the struggle over RJR Nabisco and the $25 billion paid by a Wall Street firm mostly through debt instruments, has been only part of the wave of mergers and acquisitions, by far the …

We have long been accustomed to think of nationalism as a secular creed, opposed to earlier religious faiths. Our image of nationalism is shaped by the French Revolution, that first great eruption of patriotic forces that reverberated throughout Europe and …

Taylor Branch’s massive Parting the Waters aspires to be “a history of the civil rights movement” formed out of “knitting together a number of personal stories,” first and foremost that of Martin Luther King, Jr. Branch emphasizes that the book …