Spring 2024

Two years ago I came to know a forty-year old woman living in a housing project in a decayed industrial city north of Boston. When I met Lois, she had just lost her job at Head Start after her car …

Economists have begun using the term “winner-take-all economics” to describe the fact that the salaries of investment bankers, software designers, and basketball players continue to rise while the wages of photocopy attendants and paramedics stagnate or fall toward the official …

The occupation of Haiti, the first progressive American military intervention since World War II, has also been one of the least supported. In the days leading up to the bloodless invasion, it was nearly impossible to find any American backers …

Ten years ago I taught English to the children of subsistence farmers in Togo, a tiny country on the west coast of Africa that I once thought I knew. But when I went back recently to a town seven miles …

I set out recently to read the complete novels of Toni Morrison with a mix of expectation and resentment that was probably unavoidable. What Lawrence called the “mob-self” had heard the tremendous chorus of celebration, crescendoing in the Nobel Prize. …

It’s hard to imagine how Port-au-Prince could be a worse place than the city I visited last March, but eight months later reports say that the bodies are turning up in greater numbers than at any time since the September …

When I got the telephone call with the news of Irving’s death I was writing an article for Dissent, an article he commissioned but never saw. And the first contact I ever had with him was a reply to another …

After dark in Port-au-Prince the only people on the streets are the desperate, the vicious, and those with private cars. As my Haitian friend drove through the city center, he gave me a tour guide’s narration of the night sights. …

For a quarter century Robert Stone has been the American Baudelaire—poete maudit of Catholic mysticism and controlled substances, critic of modern folly, romantic pessimist in love with apocalypse. His five novels are all alike in structure and atmosphere, carrying two …

A year ago almost everyone I knew in Boston was agonizing over how to be liberal when it seemed no longer really an option. Two men were running for governor of the only state that voted for George McGovern. One …

The State Department’s decision to stop supporting the Cambodian rebels reminds me of an experience I had that began in Bangkok and ended in a refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border. Although it happened three years ago, it might as …

On my third day in Manila I saw a woman weeding her temporary patch of the park along the bay. One wall of her house, a squatter’s plastic-sacking and drift-plywood hovel, consisted of a hand-painted sign. It said, “10-PESO ACROSS …

Spring brings out robins, crocuses, and the homeless. On a May afternoon I was sitting on the bank of the Charles River in Boston, angling for the first tentative pleasures of sun and birds, when I noticed a large man …

At present I’m just an orange that’s been trodden on by a very dirty boot.” “[The BBC’s] atmosphere is something halfway between a girls’ school and a lunatic asylum, and all we are doing at present is useless, or slightly …

LOMÉ- Vendors crowd the unpaved streets of Lome, selling Seiko watches and unpackaged socks. One of them, a small, barefoot boy, hawks a comic book called Il y avait une fois… Eyadema—”Once Upon a Time… Eyadema.” On the book’s glossy color …