From the Archives: “The Right to Be Lazy”
From the Archives: “The Right to Be Lazy”
Winter 2024
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What is an American City? 
For many years I have argued that in the decades after the Second World War, economic, demographic, and spatial transformations in the United States resulted in an urban form unlike any other in history. Recently, I realized that in one …
Dystopia and the End of Politics
In retrospect, the nineties can seem an anomalous decade, the only one since the Second World War when technological civilization did not appear particularly bent on self-destruction. Of course, not everyone greeted the end of the cold war as the …
Capitalism as Catastrophe
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein Metropolitan Books, 2007, 576 pp., $28.00 A strange contradiction afflicts nonhierarchical social movements. Those activists who are most hesitant to create formal mechanisms for naming leaders give the media …
Memory as Homeland
On George Konrád’s A Guest in My Own Country and The City Builder.
Who’s Afraid of Friedrich Hayek? The Obvious Truths and Mystical Fallacies of a Hero of the Right
Right wingers love Friedrich Hayek. The Austrian-British economist is revered by true believers at the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the National Review, and the Weekly Standard. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher cited his ideas as central to the …
Immodest Proposals
Roberto Mangabeira Unger’s What Should the Left Propose?
Ghosts, Fantasies, and Hope
Russell Jacoby’s Picture Imperfect
Future Imperfect
On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense by David Brooks
The End of History and Its Discontents
Latin America at the End of Politics by Forrest D. Colburn
A Fugitive from Utopia
The Prose of Adam Zagajewski
Imagining Marketopia
What is the proper place for the market? In the history of social and political thought, this seemingly simple question has elicited many different answers. That the answers vary so widely suggests that the question is not as simple as …
Memo To Those Who Supported the Nader Campaign
TO: THOSE WHO SUPPORTED THE NADER CAMPAIGN FROM: TODD GITLIN AND SEAN WILENTZ RE: THE OBVIOUS So here we are in the Bush II era. No small thanks to Antonin Scalia—and you. If there is a sourness in the air, …
Utopianism, Human Nature, and the Left
Is there such a thing as a universally shared human nature? And if there is, is it essentially benevolent, malevolent, or some mixture of the two? Moral and political philosophers have debated these questions for centuries. In recent years, with …
Kibbutzim: Will They Survive the New Israel?
On January 14, 1991, when the first Iraqi scuds hit Israel, one of the central commitments of the kibbutz—that children are best educated among their peers in the communal children’s house—shattered within a few hours. Parents swooped up their children …
