This past July, in the middle of a summer of political discontent, there occurred a small reason for hope. In seven American cities, thousands of men and women who toil at fast-food chain restaurants picketed in loud and energetic one-day …
Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time by Ira Katznelson Liveright Publishing, 2013, 720 pp. Few topics have been covered in such depth by academic and popular authors as the topic of
If there are some things in life that should not be bet on, the question of who will next win the Nobel Peace Prize somehow feels like it should be among them. Internet bookmakers, however, will place odds on almost …
As infamous pick-up artist Roosh himself admits in “Don’t Bang Denmark,” Nordic social democracy doesn’t support his kind.
What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France by Mary Louise Roberts University of Chicago Press, 2013, 368 pp. The title of Mary Louise Roberts’s new book, What Soldiers Do, says it all: sexual abuses …
Since losing the 2010 general election in the United Kingdom, Labour has struggled to develop a forceful alternative to the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition’s program for eliminating the public deficit through sweeping and sustained cuts in public spending. Labour’s current difficulties …
Despite widespread economic problems and suffering, there has been no upsurge in support for the European left. The articles in this section examine left parties’ current attempts to deal with these challenges.
Last spring the rights of same-sex couples gained recognition in a number of places throughout the world. In the United States, three states—Delaware, Minnesota, and Rhode Island—legalized same-sex marriage, while supreme courts in two heavyweights on the international scene, Brazil …
Now so familiar as to risk seeming clichéd, “We Shall Overcome” was the paramount song of the civil rights movement. “Deep in my heart, I do believe that we shall overcome some day”: the song spoke to a generation’s idealism, …
Henry Wallace’s 1948 Presidential Campaign and the Future of Postwar Liberalism by Thomas W. Devine University of North Carolina Press, 2013, 408 pp. Henry A. Wallace’s campaign for the presidency in 1948, amid the intense political battles of the immediate …
When Alexis Tsipras went to vote on June 17, 2012, television channels from all over the world gathered around the school auditorium where he was casting his ballot. Someone unfamiliar with Greek politics might have supposed that this blaze of …
I’m sometimes asked if Florida is in the South. Well, it’s a big state, I’ll usually say, and regional boundaries are never well defined. This summer, though, the headlines suggested some new reasons to answer the question in the affirmative. …
It is no longer clear that social democracy possesses a coherent and compelling political identity. But it is clear that social democracy has one important thing going for it: the serious commitment to democracy.
In River of Dark Dreams, Walter Johnson draws on slave narratives and planter magazines that the slave order was riven by contradictions and headed for a crisis. At a certain point, the desperate lurches of the slaveholders, the intense longings of the enslaved, and the increasing boldness of abolitionists, both black and white, had to lead to a steamboat-style explosion, whatever the precise political conjuncture.
Perhaps climate change had once seemed too large-scale, or too abstract, for the minutely human landscape of fiction. But the threat seems to have become too pressing to ignore, and less abstract, thanks to a nonstop succession of mega-storms and record-shattering temperatures. Several new novels make climate change central to their plot and setting, appropriating time-honored narratives to accord with our new knowledge and fears.
