Children of the Future 
One of the marks of modern times is that masses of ordinary people have come to believe that their children’s lives could be a lot better than their own. Over the last two centuries, as the world has opened up, …
Fall 2025
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Children of the Future
After the Gold Rush
Recent films about the 1960s belong to one of the basic romantic genres: nostalgic retrospect. The great pioneer of this genre in English was the poet William Wordsworth. Wordsworth gave us several luminous visions of his rural childhood and of …
Ruins and Reforms: New York Yesterday and Today
We beg delinquents for our life. Behind each bush, perhaps, a knife; each landscaped crag, each flowering shrub, hides a policeman with his club. —Robert Lowell, “Central Park” …the block is burning down on one side of the street, and …
Take It to the Streets
Karl Marx, writing in the 1840s, developed a perspective that can help us see why modern men and women have a special need for public space, and also why the historical forces that create this need make it especially hard …
“All That Is Solid Melts into Air”
Several years ago I began a study of modernity. I meant to explore both the history of ideas—such ideas as “modern times,” “modern society,” “the modern predicament,” and so on—and the human realities that these ideas were meant to grasp. …
