The Shaky Case for Optimism  

Rebound: Why America Will Emerge Stronger from the Financial Crisis by Stephen J. Rose St Martin’s Press, 2010, 288 pp. The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050 by Joel Kotkin Penguin Press, 2010, 320 pp. The Next 100 Years: A …









My Underdevelopment  

Ever since I left Puerto Rico to begin my life in New York as a student at Sarah Lawrence College, I have thought of myself in comparison to Sergio, the hero of Cuban director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s great movie Memories …



What Keeps Us Going?  

What keeps us going? Max Weber’s famous definition of politics as “the slow grinding of hard wood” seems to apply especially to us, the men and women of the Left. For the powerful and the rich, and for the demagogues …







Danger Culture/Safety Culture  

Underwater drilling is a tricky business. And on April 20, 2010, as British Petroleum was closing up a well it had drilled beneath the Gulf of Mexico to explore for oil, the company’s luck ran out. At the depths where …



Holidays  

My father moved out the summer before I began middle school, just before I turned twelve. The first months of separation were marked by his efforts to reach out to my two sisters and me. He came to all our …



Mom, Dad, College, and Me  

I am the seventeenth or eighteenth, possibly even the nineteenth, child of my father. But who’s counting? Certainly, he’s not. I don’t know much about his relationships with all his children—in fact, I don’t even know all my siblings—so I …



Disappointed but Not Resigned  

“THE YOUNG are honorable and see the problems,” Paul Goodman wrote in 1968, “but they don’t know anything because we have not taught them anything.” Michael Brown’s wise and eloquent essay proves him wrong. The young know quite a lot, …



Deadly Culture Wars in Pakistan  

Adding a bit of jest to Hegel, Marx quipped that if history repeats itself, it does so first as tragedy then as farce. Even by this standard, it is not clear how we should characterize Pakistan’s third overthrow of military …





The Broken Economy  

Two and a half years after the recession started, Wall Street executives are once again collecting billions in bonuses, businesses are flush with cash, but most of America is still hurting. After a growth spurt at the end of last …