Every six years, Mexico goes through an extended period of political paroxysm called presidential elections. Campaigns hijack the routines of normal public life, the media are monothematic, political propaganda litters the streets of large cities and remote villages. In a …
When Wisconsin governor Scott Walker opened his assault on collective bargaining in February 2011, few people realized it would open the door to the election of Tammy Baldwin to the U.S. Senate in November 2012. Baldwin, the first woman to …
Books discussed in this essay: A Visit From the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan, Knopf, 2010, 288 pp. A Hologram for the King, by Dave Eggers, McSweeney’s, 2012, 328 pp. Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris, Little, …
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 …
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. …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
“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.
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?”
