Feminism and Me
A feminist friend asked me to write a piece addressed to this question: How would my work have been different if I had engaged with and learned from the feminists of the late 1960s and 1970s? I have tried to …
Winter 2025
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Block Party: Election Canvassing in Suburbia
House-to-house canvassing is the epitome of routinized labor: you knock on the doors the campaign’s algorithms determine you should knock on; campaign officials ask you to follow a “script” they have tested in polls and focus groups. Efficiency is paramount. …
Fear, Violence, and the Reign of Terror 
In Defence of the Terror: Liberty or Death in the French Revolution by Sophie Wahnich, trans. David Fernbach Verso Books, 2012, 144 pp. If more people knew more about the French Revolution, their views could serve as a measure of …
Planted For Another Climate
I can’t speak for the tens of thousands of people who were hurt very badly by Hurricane Sandy and who are still in need, several months later, of a government that is big, strong, effective, and genuinely committed to the …
A Charter for the 99 Percent
After November 6, 2012, the big sound rippling around the world was not a chorus of bipartisanship, not a whoop of euphoria, but a collective sigh of relief. Still, it must not be forgotten that nearly half of America’s voters …
Baby Bust in Japan: Is the Personal Political?
Are young women in Japan on a wildcat baby strike? In 2005, for the first time since Japan began collecting population statistics in the late 1800s, the nation’s birth rate dropped below its death rate, marking a new low in …
Journalism and Revolution
Ryszard Kapuściński: A Life by Artur Domosławski Verso, 2012, 464 pp. Maybe it’s because Ryszard Kapuściński told so many stories about himself that little is actually known about him. We meet him in the alleyways of Dakar and the bazaars …
History Returns, with a Vengeance
Hungary: Between Democracy and Authoritarianism by Paul Lendvai, trans. Keith Chester. Columbia University Press, 2012, 236 pp. In March 1990, I served as a member of an international team of observers to the first postcommunist elections in Hungary. It was …
Roe v. Wade and Beyond: Forty Years of Legal Abortion in the United States
This January marked the fortieth anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion in the United States. In ways not anticipated by the coalition of physicians and feminist health activists who fought to legalize abortion in the years …
An Election Won With Class
Soon after Barack Obama won a second term with surprising ease, Pulitzer-Prize-winning artist Clay Bennett depicted a wealthy, white-haired man staring grimly at his television screen while around and behind him four servants, white and black, go about their jobs …
Love in the Time of Privatization
“Social relationships mirror wage relationships in structure and tone, but without the explicit clarity of a wage relationship”: a review of Arlie Russell Hochschild’s The Outsourced Self.
Reader’s Détente: The Decline of the Digest
In a meeting between President Ronald Reagan and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, when the friends were both in high office, the president asked Mulroney, “Brian, did you read that article in the Reader’s Digest that trees cause pollution?”
The Horizontalists
By working outside structures of power one may circumvent coercive systems but not necessarily subvert them. Localizing politics—stripping it of its larger institutional ambitions—has its advantages, but without a larger structural vision, it does not go far enough.
Zionism and Its Discontents
Given the level of alarmed debate and self-criticism in at least some major sectors of the Israeli press, the tsunami of vitriol that has descended on Peter Beinart and his book is fascinating, puzzling, and profoundly depressing.
The Rise and Fall of the American Linguistic Empire
Lawrence Summers’s celebration of the global reach of English can only be read as an unabashed apology for American empire. By even the most strategically hard-headed criteria, however, cadres drawn from a monolingual American elite are a poor choice as ambassadors of U.S. interests.
