I’m going to focus on a distinctive landscape of ruins, an amazing, dreadful landscape that came to define the South Bronx, and for many people to define New York, for the last decades of the twentieth century. Those ruins were one of New York’s great negatives. I want to try to do what Hegel says: look the negative in the face.
I had always wanted to go to Poland—the country where my father’s family comes from, but also where much of that family was wiped out.
We can learn more about globalization, inequality, and modernity from the Communist Manifesto than from any book ever written.
In Snow, and in all his best writing, Pamuk creates a drama of modern life in the process of moving toward radical polarization.
Modernism: The Lure of Heresy by Peter Gay W.W. Norton, 2007, 640., pp $35.00 Peter Gay has had a remarkable career as a scholar. He has gone through many metamorphoses and left a great paper trail. Well into his eighties, …
Charles Dickens, at the start of A Tale of Two Cities, his novel of the French Revolution, portrays 1789 as a magical year that crystallized “the best of times” and “the worst of times” within itself. Living through 1968 in …
Spirit is a power only by looking the negative in the face and living with it. Living with it is the magic power that converts the negative into being. —Hegel, Preface to The Phenomenology of the Spirit, 1807 My city’s …
The author tells a Chinese audience that now is the moment for Marx
Seventeen years ago, in a devastating song, Lou Reed portrayed Forty-Second Street and Times Square as the “Dirty Boulevard.” Looking at this same place today, we would have to call it “the cleaned-up boulevard.” What can we say about life …
Arthur Miller’s death this spring brought back his great moment half a century ago, when he defied the foul fiend. At his House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearing in June 1956, he tried to explain himself; all they wanted was …
My article in the Summer 2004 Dissent was called “Israel: No Souvenirs.” But I was wrong: early one Saturday morning, early in the fall, I got a phone call from the great Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua, who wanted to let …
I went to Israel to talk, and I talked a lot, but I did my best to listen, too. On my first day, I sat in a Jerusalem café with Z, a comparative literature student, who told me that just …
Dissent in the Twenty-first Century
Rebuilding Meaning After 9/11
I dread an American attack on Iraq, and I completely oppose it. Smart as our bombs may be, in a country with a regime famous for using its people as human shields, there is no way we can avoid killing …
