I am shocked, shocked, and in a tizzy, about demands from Wisconsin Republicans to read the e-mail of faculty members at the state university. Can they do that? Can Republicans in my state demand to read my e-mail? I am …
In his oft-quoted Fifth Report to the Massachusetts Board of Education (1841), Horace Mann sought to popularize the idea that education had individual as well as collective economic benefits. This report became one of the most well-known of Mann’s twelve …
For decades after it came out in 1925, Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, portraying an episode in the first Russian Revolution of 1905, was commonly described as the greatest film of all time. Even at the height of the Cold War, …
Years ago, in 1983, I published a book called Spheres of Justice, which was an attempt to give an account of distributive justice in domestic society. I said virtually nothing in that book about distributive justice in international society. Since …
If you look at recent academic discussions about the good and bad energies brought into play by patriotism, you are struck by a certain elusiveness regarding the commitment of the commentators. Patriotism, the love of our country, is sometimes presented …
Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America by Richard White W. W. Norton and Company, 2011, 634 pp. FOR A generation now, historians have been reluctant to write about capitalism. Cultural history has been the rage, even as …
Is religion “special”? Taking this as a philosophical question, we might conclude that it is not, that religion is a specific instance within a more general category of belief or commitment. But a philosophical question is not the same as …
In January 2011, on our first night in Durzay, one of the last Taliban-held enclaves in Southern Helmand Province, we occupied a compound just outside the main villages. Captain Abdullah, the commander of the Afghan National Army (ANA) infantry unit …
When we took to the open road that leads from college to anywhere, my friend Kate and I worried about falling into tourism. The hope of every serious traveler is to become entangled in new surroundings, to be a little …
My plane landed in Krakow on a sunny July morning. I had come there to participate in a program of graduate coursework and cultural exchange organized by the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies at the New School in New York …
When I first heard that my college had formed ties with a prison and that some of our teaching assistants were already offering courses to inmates, I leapt to join on. Motive? Dare I say it? Boredom. Teaching well is …
A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s by Stephanie Coontz Basic Books, 2011, 248 pp. IN THE past few decades, the concept of “work-life balance” has assumed a prominent place in our …
This is a moment in American life that cries out for far-flung activism on behalf of a bold democratic agenda. Instead, the partisans of democracy are largely demobilized and defensive. Why? Progressives are apt to blame cynicism spawned by Barack …
As I sat in the crypt of St. Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal on the one-year anniversary of the earthquake in Haiti, with over a thousand Haitians filling the rows, I first felt as if I were at a funeral, a …
The mantra of the current school reform movement in the United States is that high- quality teachers produce high-achieving students. As a result, we should hold teachers accountable for student outcomes, offering bonus pay to the most effective teachers and …
