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 …
For many years I have argued that in the decades after the Second World War, economic, demographic, and spatial transformations in the United States resulted in an urban form unlike any other in history. Recently, I realized that in one …
Presidential Power Stories by Christopher H. Schroeder and Curtis A. Bradley, eds. West Publishers, 2009, 499 pp., $33.00 “The Commander in Chief at the Lowest Ebb—A Constitutional History” (2 parts) by David J. Barron and Martin S. Lederman Harvard Law …
As I write, in late April of 2009, the citizens of rich capitalist societies are watching their jobs, wealth, and life plans being laid waste by an economic collapse every bit as ferocious as the crisis of the 1930s. Conservative …
“When capital is so mobile and mobilized, you have to break out of the box,” advises longtime activist and scholar Frances Fox Piven. Breaking out of the box is precisely what a six-day sit-down strike by United Electrical Radio and …
In a suburban nation enjoying declining rates of violent crime, we forget that not all places are created equal. Homicide in America remains concentrated in African American urban communities. In my city—Philadelphia—over 70 percent of homicide victims in 2008 were …
On March 4, 2009, Pre-Trial Chamber 1 of the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced that it was charging Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, with war crimes and crimes against humanity. Long anticipated, the arrest warrant was immediately used by al-Bashir’s National …
If you’re not afraid to ask for money, says nonprofit fundraising guru Kim Klein, then you weren’t born in this country or you’re a child. The taboo against talking about money, much less asking for it, has survived even as …
The Freedom Agenda: Why America Must Spread Democracy (Just Not the Way George Bush Did) by James Traub Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2008, 272 pp., $25.00 “Stepping Back from Democratic Pessimism” by Thomas Carothers Carnegie Papers, Carnegie Endowment for International …
That nearly twenty years of anti-sweatshop activism has come to naught is suggested by the cost breakdown of a $37.99 University of Connecticut hoodie that appeared in the Hartford Courant a couple of years ago: the workers received a mere …
Democracy’s Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent by Ernest Freeberg Harvard University Press, 2008, 392 pp., $29.95 [contentblock id=20 img=gcb.png] Newsweek proclaimed that Barack Obama’s budget means, “We’re all socialists now,” and conservative erstwhile presidential …
The political and military scene in Iraq is best described as a series of truces. All parties await America’s exit, and all will try to steer it in their favor. President Barack Obama’s moment can be used either to guide …
Last September, when the presidential race was close, Barack Obama tried to quell a flap in the news media over what he had intended as a routine jibe. “You can put lipstick on a pig,” Obama had said of the …
The 2008 election was historic on many counts, but one of the more significant developments was the decisive defeat of the politics of smear and fear. As the campaign wore on, and the prospects of the McCain-Palin candidacy appeared increasingly …
