From Protest to…  

Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin by John D’Emilio The Free Press, 2003, 576 pp., $35.00Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin Devon W. Carbado and Donald Wiese, eds. Cleis Press, 2003, 355 pp., …







David Glenn Responds  

Before we talk about Seattle, a few words about Milwaukee. In February 1839—less than a decade after they’d dispossessed the Menominees and other local Native Americans—the settlers of southeastern Wisconsin had a problem to solve. Hundreds of farmers had staked …



Gide’s Tragedy and Ours  

Andre Gide: A Life in the Present by Alan Sheridan Harvard University Press, 1999, 634 pp., $35 One of the hardest tasks of André Gide’s long life was a translation of Hamlet, which he completed in 1942 after twenty years …







The Last Page  

On July 2, 1977, a seventeen-year-old boy set fire to an abandoned tenement building on New York City’s Lower East Side. This fire was just a flicker in an enormous mid-1970s arson wave that struck New York’s poorest neighborhoods; it …



Surplus Meaning in Brooklyn  

A few years ago, it was revealed that the Southern Baptist Convention had compiled elaborate demographic maps of the United States. The maps displayed painstakingly calculated estimates of the number of citizens in each state who had been saved (46.1 …





The Problem with the Baffler  

The Baffler is a Chicago-based political and cultural journal produced by a circle of writers, activists, and musicians in their twenties. But you knew that already: for the last few years, the buzz surrounding the magazine has been difficult to …



Unquiet Feminism  

Ellen Willis fits a certain stereotype of the post-1960s radical. Out of feminist principle she has renounced marriage. She opposes the war on drugs and writes unrepentantly about the acid trips of her youth. She’s a New Yorker, she’s Jewish, …



Lesbian and Gay March  

Recent mass marches on Washington, no matter how noble or well-attended, have generally been dispiriting affairs. On various days in the past six years liberals and leftists have gathered on the Mall by the tens of thousands in support of …