Fall 2025

When we think of the founding of the early colonies, we usually think of the journey to freedom, in particular of the Puritans fleeing religious persecution to settle the Massachusetts Bay Colony. But it was not so for a majority …

I began to write these lines while listening to a speech by Hugo Chávez at a summit of the Andean Community of Nations in Lima, Peru, some time in 2005. As inspiration for this article, the speech helped crystallize my …

Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists by Susan Neiman Harcourt, 2008, 480 pp., $27.00 Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal by Rob Riemen Yale University Press, 2008, 116 pp., $22 In 2001 Susan Neiman published Evil in Modern Thought: …

Too many Americans have bought into the idea that most of our nation’s problems can be blamed on our school system, and that the only way to solve them is through “school reform.” It’s an old story, but it became …

Last January, the New York Times reported that assembly line workers at Detroit automobile factories, who have been earning around $28 per hour, would be “bought out” and gradually replaced by workers earning as little as half of that. This …

The big question used to be, when did you leave the Communist Party? And the answer was always, too late, because the questioner had either left before you or had never joined. In this campaign season, the question is, why …

In the fall of 1964, Ronald Reagan went on national television to tell the American people about a growing tyranny in their midst, “subtler, but no less dangerous” than Soviet communism. He also told them to cast their presidential vote …

This is a part of a debate on The Wire. To read, Atlas and Dreier’s initial article, click here. To read Anmol Chaddha, Sudhir Venkatesh, and William Julius Wilson, click here.   We, too, were big fans of The Wire …

Health-promotion experts and historians generally concur that the federal government’s response to HIV/AIDS during the 1980s and early 1990s was inadequate and constrained by moralism. President Ronald Reagan famously refused to publicly address the issue of AIDS until five years …

This is a part of a debate on The Wire. To read John Atlas and Peter Dreier’s article, click here. To read, Atlas and Dreier’s response, click here.   Although we agree that The Wire does not take on every …

Until recently, my husband and I had been seeing one of those “Oh-I’m-so-glad-he’s-my-doctor” physicians for two decades. Then one day the mail brought the announcement that the office was closing its doors and that the four doctors who had been …

Determining when one period gave way to another or, in fact, naming a period is always a tricky matter. This is especially so when it comes to contemporary events. Processes are still going on and it is not yet evident …

Fanon: A Novel by John Edgar Wideman Houghton Mifflin, 2008, 240 pp., $24.00 The overall critical response to John Edgar Wideman’s Fanon was not positive. Carlin Romano wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer, “At a time when Barack Obama offers America …

Bill Clinton after signing the Financial Services Modernization Act in 1999. Photo: Justin Lane/The New York Times/Redux The conventional wisdom has held that economic policy was a great success under Bill Clinton in the 1990s and a failure ever since. …