“Is there such a thing as the left and right? What distinguishes them, not just in our time but across time?” Bruce Robbins and James Livingston argue with Corey Robin and Michael Kazin about their recent attempts to theorize the political spectrum.
At the American Civil Liberties Union’s national headquarters in New York City, four months of negotiations have failed to bring unionized office staff to an agreement with management over the terms of their employment. Last Wednesday these employees held their …
Obamacare will help all Americans in significant ways, yet it remains controversial. What will it take for the program to join Medicare and Social Security as a permanent part of America’s system of social insurance?
In the past week, two new stories of brutality have called China’s attention to the lawlessness of controversial “urban management” teams known as chengguan.
A new set of reality shows thrive on foreclosed property and unpaid bills; they promote a bargain-basement ethos where everything has a price, and where discovering and comparing those prices is a source of pleasure.
Russian and American nuclear scientists perceived the remarkable similarity of the workings of the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy and the American Department of Energy. Now, as the opening of secret archives and closed cities has since set loose a flood of historical writing about atomic weapons programs, Kate Brown’s Plutopia offers a comparative study.
The German new Left was too close to the history it so desperately wanted to negate; it could not develop a sane or truthful relationship to the crimes and the cruelty of the Nazi era. Haunted by visions of the gas chambers, it believed that the only alternatives were the creation of a utopia or the recreation of Auschwitz.
Violence has ebbed and flowed in Darfur for more than ten years now. Now, though the situation is almost totally absent from news coverage, the region teeters on the edge of a complete humanitarian collapse and uncontrollable violence.
Legal precedent is against the recent Supreme Court decision to gut the Voting Rights Act. There is, however, a grim precedent for the Roberts Court in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, which also turned the law on its head.
The violence that occurred in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang region in western China, on July 5, 2009 was both shocking and predictable. Four years later, what are the prospects for further unrest in Xinjiang?
Activists in Philadelphia have responded to an austere “doomsday budget” with civil disobedience, hunger strikes, and community outreach. The crisis has revealed the potential for a city-wide insurgency.
In his much-anticipated speech on climate change, President Obama proposed smart, modest policies that would help decrease greenhouse gas emissions through support for renewable energy development and increased energy efficiency measures, prepare the country for the climate change that is …
Political leaders and the news media have presented the sudden reversing of a thirty-five-year decline in the U.S. production of fossil fuels as a sign of the recovery of the country’s national independence. To others the bonanza threatens not a newfound independence but a deepening dependency.
Richard Hell left behind the idea of self-cultivation as an art form—that discerning judgment constitutes who we are or can be at our best. He also warned of how so much revolt can form a narcissistic prison.
Richard Dienst’s The Bonds of Debt tells a series of intertwined but also divergent stories, all drawing us deeper into the mysteries of social life under capitalism but each gripping in its own distinct way. It’s not every writer in the Marxist tradition who has the courage to enter into mysteries he may not be able to elucidate, to tell stories that may not end by cohering as fully as he would like.
