On April 2, 2005, a month-and-a half after arriving in Iraq, I was in combat for the first time. We were pounded with mortars, rockets, grenades, vehicle-borne explosives, and small-arms fire for nearly two hours. After the fighting stopped, I …
The announcement by Barack Obama of the surge in U.S. troop deployment to Afghanistan—from a two-thousand-strong force in 2001 to one hundred thousand troops sometime this year—came bundled with a provision for a quick drawdown starting in July 2011. The …
To sit in your dorm room and believe you can change the world may be a certain kind of American collegiate tradition, akin to tailgating at Homecoming, taking Bob Marley seriously, and holding your roommate’s head over the toilet bowl …
I count myself among those disappointed in Barack Obama’s presidency so far. I had not expected miracles, but I had hoped for a more dramatic turnaround in our politics: for an end to the war in Afghanistan; a rapid closing …
Hello, America. I am the lowercase “g.” After the holidays, I am usually a happy sort. Congress returns from vacation, and my humble, seventh-place self is thrust back into the spotlight by the reintroduction into the national debate of words …
Richard Rorty, who died in 2007, was one of the leading American philosophers of the twentieth century. Rorty hailed from a family of leftists. His parents, James Rorty and Winifred Raushenbush, were disillusioned communists with avowed Trotskyist sympathies. His maternal …
The mantra of the current Israeli government that Jerusalem is “the eternal, undivided capital of the Jewish people” does nothing to resolve the stalemate over the city’s status. Nor does saying these words make Jerusalem truly undivided. The truth is …
Bad faith, indeed! George Packer’s opening sentences in the New York Times Magazine article he published as the Iraq invasion loomed read, “If you’re a liberal, why haven’t you joined the antiwar movement? More to the point, why is there …
After I’ve walked the dog, checked and rechecked that I have my lecture notes and student critiques ready for the 10:00 a.m. class I teach at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop, I sit at my desk with my second mug of …
With a steep recession in full swing, it’s French-bashing time again on the editorial pages and in the business sections of American newspapers. As the Obama administration frantically weighed policy options, pundits agonized over the prospect of the U.S. government’s …
The infusion of money into highways through gasoline taxes and the suburban exodus of the middle class and their adoption of the automobile as the primary mode of transportation profoundly altered the nation’s landscape over the past fifty years. The …
Jim Rule has written a wonderfully bracing but also a strangely high-minded critique of United States foreign policy. By “high-minded” I mean first of all abstracted from all the difficult decisions of past and present policy making. And I mean, …
At the Greyhound, Seven Stages, and Trailways bus stations, when you approach the ticket agents behind the glass that separates the world of employees and rules from the public at large, you may be asked, “Where are you trying to …
Fifteen years ago, Todd Gitlin offered a precise and devastating metaphor for what he saw then as the academic Left’s default from democratic politics. In The Twilight of Common Dreams, Gitlin noted that while the Left was “marching on the …
I want to focus on the question of patriotism. If an American child and a Peruvian child were drowning, would you rush to save the American child first? If you were in charge of feeding an international crowd of travelers …
