Keynes: The Return of the Master by Robert Skidelsky Public Affairs, 2009, 256 pp., $25.95 Keynes: The Rise, Fall, and Return of the 20th Century’s Most Influential Economist by Peter Clarke Bloomsbury, 2009, 211 pp., $20 A fierce debate raged …
The United States has been fighting the war in Afghanistan for more than eight years. That’s longer than U.S. participation in the Second World War or the Iraq War. By the end of 2010, it will have surpassed the length …
It has been more than a year since I sat with my older brother at my father’s side, watching him slowly succumb to pancreatic cancer. At the age of seventy-two, James Bevel had seen and experienced more than most men. …
I doubt there is a “should” here anywhere. How one responds to the first query will turn, in part, on whom one places within the category “American intellectuals.” For the sake of this discussion, let’s assume that those who make …
There may have been a day when American intellectuals had the luxury of thumbing their noses at pop culture: magazines and journals devoted to serious reflection enjoyed healthy circulations; weighty thinkers won notice for their big ideas rather than their …
Richard Nixon showed that there really are second (and third) acts in American life, but Congress didn’t get the memo, and so Jean Montrevil may be denied his own American Dream. A Haitian citizen who came to the United States …
In the summer of 2008, I went to work as a volunteer for the Obama campaign in my hometown of Gainesville, Georgia. To my and everyone’s surprise, the campaign had hired a field organizer for Gainesville, a nineteen-year-old Jewish student …
There is a small fortune to be made writing about the young. Neil Howe and the late William Strauss showed that in 1991 with their bestselling Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069, and since then, Howe and …
Finally, the atrocity of gendercide—the murder and mutilation of victims selected by sex—is getting prominent attention in the press. Through feminist online activism, but more prominently through the efforts of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof (in his new book …
The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement by Miriam Pawel Bloomsbury Press, 2009, 384 pp., $28 In 1978, just after I graduated from college, I worked at a migrant health clinic in …
Growing up in the Bronx, I realized early on that this wasn’t a place for me. In the Bronx you witness many things you shouldn’t have to see. You have to be street smart and quick on your feet so …
The U.S. announcement that it would reopen direct contacts with Burma/Myanmar’s military government promises a welcome change from a failed policy of twenty years of isolation and sanctions. Burma/Myanmar has a singularly Manichean politics, as indicated by its dual name: …
In 1980, Ronald Reagan’s election brought the New Right to Washington. For feminists, it was the culmination of a series of devastating setbacks. The new administration gave the green light to an anti-feminist agenda that the Moral Majority, the Hyde …
I flew to post–Hurricane Katrina New Orleans on July 1, 2006, one week after my eighteenth birthday, where, except for a few weeks of visits home, I would live for the next eight months. I thought I was going to …
The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education by Diane Ravitch Basic Books, 2010, 288 pp., $26.95 It’s fall 2007. Diane Ravitch is packing a career’s worth of reading and writing …
