We are living in an age of austerity and, together with most Europeans and the Japanese, will probably have to endure it for some time to come. The truly wretched “compromise” on the debt limit that Barack Obama agreed to …
Let’s start with the numbers. On May 28, an estimated twenty thousand people flooded into downtown Santiago and marched on the presidential palace to protest the HidroAysén project, a plan to build a series of hydroelectric dams on two of …
An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War by J. Hoberman The New Press, 2011, 432 pp. From High Noon to The Ten Commandments, from low-budget horror films like Them! to noir melodramas like Panic …
Who would believe that Albert Shanker, the late, controversial president of the American Federation of Teachers, was one of the original backers of the charter school concept, publicizing the name and idea in his weekly “Where We Stand” column of …
During the last decade, the population of children entering U.S. schools unable to speak English grew by 40 percent. One in ten pre-K–12 students, a total of 5.3 million, are categorized as English Language Learners (ELLs). This large number of …
The debate about the state of film criticism has settled—or calcified—into two camps: traditional print critics claim the Internet has replaced expertise with amateurs, fanboys, and obscurantists. Web enthusiasts counter that we’re in a new golden age of film criticism …
Many observers of European politics warn that democracy on the continent is in peril. Conservative authors argue that European governments are threatened by a spineless surrender to “Islamofascism,” while liberals fret that Europe is being overtaken by “ghosts of a …
At this moment (May Day!), the outcome of the uprisings across the Arab world is radically uncertain. The massive demonstrations and the early successes in Tunisia and Egypt were exhilarating, and the courage of the Syrian demonstrators is inspiring—even though …
It’s been a tough year to be a teacher, especially a unionized one. Popular opinion holds that unions protect bad teachers at the cost of poor kids’ education. If only we teachers would stop being lazy and complacent, American students …
Four years ago I began going to Little Lina, a hamlet of fifty households a few hours’ trek from the nearest road winding through the Chinese Himalaya. My aim was to find out how grand ideas about poverty alleviation and …
My amiable but ever preening friend Resaka had already warned me about the March 8 International Women’s Day holiday. He insisted it was less an opportunity for mothers, sisters, and daughters to assert their worth during their twenty-four-hour public platform …
We are grateful for the historical and constitutional perspective that William Galston brings to his stimulating response. He does not dispute our charge that the present regime of religious accommodation rests on philosophically unsound arguments. Instead, he says this is …
When Mark Twain published The Innocents Abroad in 1869, he had in mind entertaining his readers with a travel book about a group of naïve Americans who make a pleasure trip to Europe and the Middle East aboard the steamship …
You wish that people who want to challenge your work would reach out, send an e-mail, or pick up the phone. I get many such e-mails. The result is often learning for me, for my interlocutor, and for both of …
Controversy in the summer and fall of 2010 over plans for the construction of an Islamic community center in New York City near Ground Zero reminds us that America’s legacy of religious freedom is by no means settled. Debates about …
