Like many members of the moviegoing public, I didn’t rush to see Home of the Brave (2006), In the Valley of Elah (2007), Redacted (2007), Grace Is Gone (2007), A Mighty Heart (2007), Badland (2007), or any of the other …
Turn the page, turn the page! No, not the one you are reading, not just yet. It is the country that needs to turn onto a new page. It is hard to think of an aspect of our political, social, …
Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again by David Frum Doubleday, 2008, 213 pp., $24.95 The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History by Donald T. Critchlow Harvard University Press, 2007, 359 pp., $27.95 They Knew They Were Right: …
Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein Scribner, 2008, 748 pp., $37.50 For decades, liberal scholars and journalists have been trying to figure out how it came to this. How did we end …
In The Vast Majority, a book published thirty-one years ago, Michael Harrington wrote of a trip to India during the reign of Indira Gandhi. He mused on the chutzpah of reporting his impressions after only a few weeks in this …
In the best 60 Minutes tradition, a China Central Television (CCTV) producer sent me out last summer to the planned “Jade River” real estate redevelopment for some investigative reporting on the fate of Beijing’s historic hutongs or alleyways. I was …
How do we know when something starts or when a new phenomenon becomes a major trend? We don’t have a “big bang” theory for the “second wave” of the women’s movement. The common wisdom has been that it began when …
Walter A. O’Brien, Jr. Photo courtesy of Julia O’Brien-Merrill On a clear, chilly day in November 2004, then-Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney stood inside a large white tent set up on the brick plaza outside Boston City Hall. Romney wasn’t there …
Barry Gewen’s review of Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise (Winter 2008) contains a factual error that illustrates the flaw in his argument. He describes the Beatles song “Norwegian Wood” as having a “pentatonic melody”—a melody restricted to five notes—which …
Since September 11, 2001, we have been fighting the so-called “war on terror” without the active participation of all three branches of government. For the first several years, a very aggressive president acted alone, without Congress or the Supreme Court. …
In early September 1968, American feminism announced its arrival to the nation, when a hundred women demonstrators from New York traveled down to Atlantic City to disrupt the Miss America pageant. The protest on the boardwalk was more or less …
A Dubious Normalcy
A well-known political scientist once declared that the definition of the alternatives is the supreme instrument of power. The simple question—single-payer or not—conceals major differences over whether to frame the health care issue primarily as an economic question or a …
From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture’s Encounter with the American City by Nathan Glazer Princeton University Press, 2007, 310 pp., $24.95 Like many utopian visions that someone is crazy enough to attempt to realize, modernist architecture has always …
Here’s a secret, the kind we hardly acknowledge to ourselves. But first, you may be wondering who this “we” is, on whose behalf I am writing. In truth, I am not sure. Maybe it is the Jews. But the problem …
