Next year, welfare as we now know it is slated to come before Congress for reauthorization. By “welfare” I mean federally financed cash assistance to low-income mothers (and occasionally fathers) with children. Welfare as we used to know it was …
The start of the twenty-first century finds America in a perilous state that many consider to be a turning point in our history, one that could lead to a painful decline in living standards. According to recent polls, a majority …
What Are Intellectuals Good For? by George Scialabba Pressed Wafer, 2009, 252 pp., $15, paper [contentblock id=20 img=gcb.png] I made my first acquaintance with George Scialabba’s work under unfortunate circumstances. It was the fall of 1995, and a colleague e-mailed …
In 1973—the same year that the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, legalizing abortion, the U.S. House of Representatives accepted its first female page, and AT&T settled a major lawsuit by agreeing to end pay discrimination against women—Holt, Rinehart and …
On the blogs, in the newspapers, in restaurants, there has been so much discussion of the New Deal lately that the chatter could seem like that at a historians’ convention. Conservatives express panic about socialism and argue that the New …
The sorry state of Israel’s Labor Party is all the more striking against the background of its unique role in the country’s past. Mapai, as it was once called (a Hebrew acronym for The Party of the Workers of the …
As the unemployment numbers rise in the current economic troubles, it’s hard not to think of the flotsam of the Great Depression years, the men and boys and whole families who went on the road or lost their homes. We …
Quarterlies are often late to cover the politics of the moment, but sometimes we anticipate arguments to come. We carried important articles on torture in the Summer 2003 issue, and we have come back to it again and again in …
Not every actor who gets a role that defines him is lucky. Ronald Reagan had to wait until the very end of his acting career for his defining role, mob boss Browning in Don Siegel’s 1964 The Killers, and he …
As recently as last year’s presidential campaign, the debate on Barack Obama’s environmental agenda would have centered on righting the astonishing wrongs of the George W. Bush era. The last administration’s performance—the junking of science, the suppression of basic information, …
Who could object to Ohio’s anti-terrorist oath? Created as part of the 2006 “Ohio Patriot Act,” it merely requires every new public employee to answer “no” to six questions regarding affiliation with, or “material support” to, any organization on the …
In transportation, as in so many areas, the Obama administration is playing catch-up. But few other fields of policy offer such opportunities for innovation. Changing circumstances make attainable what once was visionary. And transportation’s unusual status in today’s polarized politics, …
The debate about the impact of the Internet on democracy is barely a decade old, but it has already sowed great confusion in the minds of academics and practitioners alike. It doesn’t help that both of these concepts represent complex, …
Marriage is both ubiquitous and central. All across our country, in every region, every social class, every race and ethnicity, every religion or non-religion, people get married. For many if not most people, moreover, marriage is not a trivial matter. …
These days, U.S. city planning exudes an audacious air. The suburban sprawl that has dominated U.S. development since the Second World War is under assault from a multitude of policy makers and activists bent on protecting the environment and revitalizing …
