Calling this year’s political fight about funding for contraception a “war on women” may be a catchy slogan and a strong mobilizing call. But as an analysis, it is misleading. True, birth control does affect women disproportionately, because women still …
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt Pantheon, 2012, 419 pp. “This book,” writes Jonathan Haidt in his introduction to The Righteous Mind, “is about why it’s so hard for us to …
If U.S. higher education is in crisis, as a spate of recent books and articles would have it, then it’s a strange crisis. Outside the anti-intellectual Right, and even inside it when its writers forget themselves, we hear that advanced …
Republic Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It by Lawrence Lessig Twelve, 2011, 381 pp. Money talks. It is also a conversation stopper. Almost any discussion among progressives of what is really needed to solve the nation’s …
There is a lot of attention being given these days to remediation in higher education. “Failure to Launch,” reads one representative headline, “Community College Students Can’t Meet Higher Goals.” The numbers vary but, on average, suggest that about 35 percent …
The hype for my forty-fifth college reunion this past June started months in advance. The school, one of those that “changes lives,” is the archetypal small liberal arts college. It was the place, my parents promised, that would prepare me …
Click here to read James B. Rule’s initial essay, “Israel: The Great Disconnect,” and here to read Michael Walzer’s response. Michael Walzer is a desperate man. When people this smart start making arguments this bad, you know that their worldview …
Click here to read James B. Rule’s reply to Michael Walzer (and here for Rule’s initial essay, “Israel: The Great Disconnect.”) Jim Rule has provided us with a useful example of a critique of Israel that is fairly common in …
Like free markets and Christianity, liberal education in the United States has more noisy claimants than true friends. Lately, it’s conservatives who’ve been crying hosanna to the humanities and funding campus institutes that conscript classic texts into training future Platonic …
Click here to read Michael Walzer’s response to this essay, and here to read a reply by James B. Rule. I was attending a friend’s wedding at the Park Avenue Synagogue in Manhattan. Before starting the ceremony, the rabbi was …
The People’s Pension: The Struggle to Defend Social Security Since Reagan by Eric Laursen AK Press, 2012, 818 pp. Eric Laursen has written a highly readable, exhaustively researched history of the last thirty years of struggles over Social Security. His …
The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It by Timothy Noah Bloomsbury Press, 2012, 272 pp. In September 2010, a full year before protesters occupied Zuccotti Park in New York City, Timothy Noah wrote …
Social movements can be very grand. Years ago, Richard Rorty wrote an article in Dissent describing Christianity and Marxism as prototypical social movements (“Movements and Campaigns,” Winter 1995)—they aimed to transform the world and to create “new” men and women. …
Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation by Richard Sennett Yale University Press, 2012, 336 pp. Richard Sennett’s new book was already in press when the Occupy movement took to the streets last fall. But its title alone suggests …
The Short American Century: A Postmortem Edited by Andrew Bacevich Harvard University Press, 2012, 287 pp. The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by the superiority in applying organized …
