The nuclear disaster at the Fukushima power plant in March 2011 gave rise to very different sentiments in this country than it did in Japan. Whereas our press, seeking cultural and historical reference points, invoked Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and …
Until the emergence of Occupy Wall Street, a disturbing absence marked American political life. The nation’s economic miseries continued, with unemployment high and home sales stagnant or dropping. The gap between the wealthiest Americans and their fellow citizens yawned wider …
At first glance, Germany appears, economically, to be quite unusually successful. Despite the budgetary and financial crises affecting the other nations of the European Union, the German unemployment rate is declining. It has a positive export balance, and its own …
In the fall of 2011, I taught a graduate food studies course at New York University devoted to the farm bill, a massive and massively opaque piece of legislation passed most recently in 2008 and up for renewal in 2012. …
Poetry has a very economical way of using language, good for nations that do not have a lot of peace and quiet. This may help explain the excellence of the poetic tradition in a country like Poland. The best known …
On July 1, 2011, halfway through a speech commemorating the ninetieth anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, President Hu Jintao stressed the importance of a people-centered approach to governance. Going forward, he said, the Party must “follow …
When the Tea Party emerged in 2009, most progressive critics characterized it as a sprawling movement of “angry white men.” But it is also a party of angry white women. Everyone in the Tea Party shares an ideology that calls …
When Michael Harrington’s The Other America: Poverty in the United States first appeared in bookstores in March 1962, its author had modest hopes for its success, expecting to sell at most a few thousand copies. Instead, the book proved a …
It should be common sense—but often is not—that nearly every act of production, construction, service, transmission, transportation, and health care in America is performed by working men and women, most of whom earn less money and respect than they deserve. …
When Canada’s New Democratic Party (NDP) leader Jack Layton died of prostate cancer at age sixty-one in August, the outpouring of grief was extraordinary. Thousands attended his funeral and lined the streets, wearing the orange colors of the social democratic …
Most people think that farm work in the vineyards and fields of California is unskilled labor, largely undifferentiated work in which an army of Mexican-born migrants follow the harvest northward from the border as the fruits and vegetables ripen with …
Cambodia’s Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land by Joel Brinkley
Ankle bracelets are almost fashionable these days. Martha Stewart wore one on her television show. Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton may have converted them into a rite of passage for inebriated starlets. In fact, Chanel’s 2008 spring show featured ankle …
One hundred fifty years after Confederate shots bombarded Fort Sumter, President Barack Obama officially proclaimed April 12, 2011, to be the first day of a four-year-long Civil War Sesquicentennial and called “upon all Americans to observe this Sesquicentennial with appropriate …
In February 1989, the northeast Hungarian city of Miskolc gave birth to a remarkable civil rights movement. When a proposal to expel hundreds of Roma from a public housing estate surfaced at the Miskolc city government, dissidents formed an “anti-ghetto …
