The war on drugs is entering its twentieth year. On October 24, 1969, President Richard Nixon called a press conference to issue the initial declaration of war. Every president since has escalated the hostilities. President-elect Bush promises to do the …
Joan Didion, in a needle-sharp piece in the New York Review of Books, describes Michael Dukakis outside his campaign plane on a broiling day, playing catch with a baseball. Every reporter and every television crew participant knows the action is …
Something must be at stake in the edgy debates circulating around and about something called postmodernism. What, then? Commentators pro, con, serious, fey, academic, and accessible seem agreed that something postmodern has happened, even if we are all (or virtually …
Some thirty years ago in these pages, William L. Neumann registered an eloquent protest against the acquiescence of American academics to the conservative temper of their time. “Today’s American historian probably reflects his age more completely than in any previous …
Mass popular and nationalist demonstrations throughout the Republic of Serbia, an inflation reaching over 230 percent, faltering economic performance, and growing public acrimony within the ruling party, the League of Communists (LCY)—these are a few symptoms of the current crisis …
The year of the stock market crash, 1987, was also the year of the intellectual crisis. Afterward the stock market seemed to right itself, but that can’t be said about the world of thought. Intellectual crises tend to be that …
On a recent morning in Lhasa a lone Western tourist was strolling through the dim, centuries-old corridors of Jokang Temple, the holiest shrine of contemporary Tibetan Buddhism. An accompanying guide recited the histories of the magnificent thangka paintings adorning the …
The finest body of historical writing to appear during the past twenty years has probably been produced by students of slavery and emancipation. An outpouring of exceptional studies by scholars in the United States, Brazil, Cuba, and other countries has …
In the past fifteen years, the health of the local economy has become the pressing urban policy issue. Although the older manufacturing cities are most in need of an energetic policy, the issue is a top priority for virtually every …
Consider the teachers’ strikes which have become a familiar part of the opening of the school year around the United States every September. Negotiations stall. The union sets a strike date. The school superintendent places a notice in the local …
John Cort has taken on a vexed and interesting topic: the politics of Christianity. As intellectual history, Christian Socialism deserves a straight A-even if, as political advocacy, it’s less easy to grade. Cort has subtitled his book “An Informal History,” …
Warsaw in early September 1988 was a city swept by an air of excitement, hope, and nervous anticipation. The government had just announced a course of action designed—or so it would seem— to set Poland on the road to economic …
China, one has been told since Deng Xiaoping’s market-oriented reforms began in the late 1970s, is becoming capitalist. So is the Soviet Union under Gorbachev, similarly with Hungary, Angola, Vietnam, and all the other economies that were once centrally planned …
For the past two years Soviet newspapers and magazines have used the unexpected freedom made available by glasnost. Once, editors had to clear all questionable material with the censors; now, if they ask, they are told to decide for themselves. …
The case for an increase in the federal minimum wage has long been persuasive. The wage floor of $3.35 an hour has not been raised for eight years; adjusted for inflation, its purchasing power has fallen to its lowest level …
