Spring 2025

Every couple of years friends of friends from Denmark come to visit. When they leave I always ask them, “What impressed you the most about New York City?” Always, I hear the same reply. Not the Statue of Liberty, the …

For years, one of the most exploited segments in public services had been the nonprofessionals in New York City’s hospitals, public schools, and governmental offices. Receiving the lowest pay among municipal workers, they remained primarily outside the organized labor movement, …

In that long gone time during Hitler’s war when I was madly in love with M., the Village’s most frequented femme fatale, I had to hear a lot about her other lovers, some of whom must have been concurrent with …

The drive for “privatization” first began to gain momentum, like such key elements of the Reagan agenda as deregulation and acceleration of weapons procurement (the infamous MX was a Carter favorite), in Jimmy’s  administration. Its advocates claim that privatization not …

During the waning years of the nineteenth century, American workers experienced changes in production methods that proved disastrous to their lives and health. The growth of the factory system and mass production, combined  with a nearly total lack of regulation …

Spain last year commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War. The occasion elicited a massive outpouring of articles, memoirs, books, conferences. The bloody events were re-examined and scrutinized, but one would have had to look far …

At the end of the Copacabana beach in Rio stands a huge rock called the Morro do Leme. Slowly but remorselessly, the tides are turning the rock into sand. If we measure human change by this standard, Brazil’s 486-year history …

In that part of the world where political legitimacy is derived from the universal law of continuous technical development, industrialization, concentration, and centralization, the strength of dispersed small-scale agricultural production and the relative well-being of the peasantry are not self-evident. …

Few beliefs are more deeply embedded in American popular wisdom than those concerning the inefficiency of government. In an era when liberals, moderates, and conservatives find little basis for common cause, criticizing government’s performance is a unifying ritual. The public …

The bilateral and multilateral negotiations to reduce the arsenals of death do not give much ground for hope. Reykjavik and its aftermath are a slender thread on which to hang the framework of peace. The best that can be anticipated …

Richard Powers’s valuable and well-balanced biography of Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover reminds us of the two foremost themes that any analysis of the FBI’s role in twentieth-century American politics must confront: how the Bureau’s biases generally …

Forty years ago Simone de Beauvoir sat in front of a blank sheet of paper at the Cafe des Deux Magots, on the Boulevard St. Germain in Paris, wanting to write about herself: I realized that the first question to …

“I keep thinking,” Michael Herr writes in Dispatches, “about all the kids who got wiped out by seventeen years of war movies before coming to Vietnam to get wiped out for good. . . . We’d all seen too many …

Georg Lukács liked to say that Marxism is the Himalayas of thought. But, he warned, a hare atop the Himalayas ought not to imagine himself taller than an elephant in the valley below. The most fertile Marxist mind of our …