I first encountered The Death and Life of Great American Cities in college. A course on U.S. urban history assigned Jane Jacobs’s 1961 bombshell of a book during a discussion of urban renewal, and I was a Jacobsean from that …
Age of Fracture by Daniel T. Rodgers, Harvard University Press, 2011, 352 pp. THE VERY notion of “society” originated as part of a highly optimistic scenario: according to Enlightenment belief, human bonds were evolving in the eighteenth century beyond the …
The good classroom is rich in small moments of intelligence and care. There is the big stuff of course—the week-long science experiment, the dramalogue, the reporting of one’s research—but important as well are the spontaneous question, the inviting gesture, the …
The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin by Stephen Cohen PublishingWorks, 2010, 224 pp. WE ALL have a few moments of culture shock when we first get to college, and I had mine the day university president Larry …
In his remarks at the Centennial Conference of the National Urban League on July 29, 2010, Barack Obama reminded his audience that “from day one of this administration, we’ve made excellence in American education—excellence for all our students—a top priority.” …
Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson Simon and Shuster, 2010, 357 pp. TWO AND A HALF YEARS AGO, in the midst of economic collapse, it …
I have been to Israel four times: twice as a child, twice as an adult. Each time, I went as a tourist. Among serious Jews, that’s a fairly shameful admission. I have never gone to Israel to study or work. …
If Wittgenstein can end the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus with an invitation to mystical flight, it is not amiss, I hope, to end this issue with the kind of vague-minded musing on human movement for which any scrupulous thinker will mock Michael …
After decades of harsh and unyielding military dictatorship, the political landscape in Myanmar (Burma) shifted in the closing months of 2010 as the first general election in twenty years approached. Key figures in a ruling cabal seldom known to curry …
In a famous essay, the political philosopher Gerry Cohen asked, “If you are an egalitarian, how come you are you so rich?” He pointed out that many professed egalitarians are quite wealthy, yet they devote only a small amount of …
The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s by Richard Wolin Princeton University Press, 2010, 391 pp. IT WOULD BE EASY—and perhaps entertaining—to write a history of Maoism in France that would …
“Why would you want to live in Israel?” Irving Howe asked me, his voice rising in bemusement. It was 1981, and we were at Leo’s Coffee Shop on Madison Avenue near 86th Street. I was two years out of Sarah …
I was raised enough of a Jew to take some things for granted: certain blessings rolling off the tongue; instinctual skepticism of pork chops; good deeds ringing in my mind as “mitzvot”; a general support for Israel. I attended a …
Daniel Bell’s The End of Ideology is one of the Times Literary Supplement’s “100 most influential non-fiction books published since the Second World War.” Bell, who died in late January at the age of ninety-one, never dishonored the intellectual’s motto: …
“Check your Rolex. It’s time for a rebellion.” In the fall of 2010, protesters against the reform of the French pension system lacked neither catchy slogans nor energy. For more than a month, unionists and a variety of left activists …
