This is a part of a debate on The Wire. To read Anmol Chaddha, Sudhir Venkatesh, and William Julius Wilson, click here. To read, Atlas and Dreier’s response, click here. The Wire, the television drama about Baltimore that ended its …
This past spring, French president Nicolas Sarkozy published a “point of view” article in the French newspaper Le Monde entitled “For Strong Unions.” After writing of his desire to enhance the “social dialogue,” he expressed his support for measures that …
B.J. Widick recently passed away at the age of 97. His death brings to a close the rich and lengthy life of a notable figure in the trade union and socialist movements. Born in a Serbian village in 1910, Widick …
The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker by Steven Greenhouse Knopf, 2008, 345 pp., $25.95 Love the Work, Hate the Job: Why America’s Best Workers Are Unhappier Than Ever by David Kusnet Wiley & Sons, 2008, 270 pp., …
Preliminary Theme You could feel the frost as soon as I posed the question. The week before I went to see Philip Glass’s opera Satyagraha, which is subtitled M.K. Gandhi in South Africa, I attended a screening of a documentary …
Supporters of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, for all their differences, have in the course of this emotional primary season come to view the Democratic Party’s nominating process as seriously flawed. To be sure, Obama’s enthusiasts would seem to …
A luxurious hotel in rural Hertfordshire on the outskirts of London might seem a surprising venue for a conference of the world’s self-declared progressives. But members of the democratic center-left power elites, mainly from Europe, but with a sprinkling from …
When it comes to finding the bad guys of Olympic history, all roads lead to Germany. Writing in the New York Times at the height of the torch relay fracas in April this year, Edward Rothstein pointed the way: “If …
Getting from Montreal to Makassar is not a picnic. During the thirty-six hours my partner and I spend in transit, we debate whether it is more important to teach public health or philosophy in Indonesia, because this is the reason …
Like many members of the moviegoing public, I didn’t rush to see Home of the Brave (2006), In the Valley of Elah (2007), Redacted (2007), Grace Is Gone (2007), A Mighty Heart (2007), Badland (2007), or any of the other …
Turn the page, turn the page! No, not the one you are reading, not just yet. It is the country that needs to turn onto a new page. It is hard to think of an aspect of our political, social, …
Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again by David Frum Doubleday, 2008, 213 pp., $24.95 The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History by Donald T. Critchlow Harvard University Press, 2007, 359 pp., $27.95 They Knew They Were Right: …
Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein Scribner, 2008, 748 pp., $37.50 For decades, liberal scholars and journalists have been trying to figure out how it came to this. How did we end …
In The Vast Majority, a book published thirty-one years ago, Michael Harrington wrote of a trip to India during the reign of Indira Gandhi. He mused on the chutzpah of reporting his impressions after only a few weeks in this …
In the best 60 Minutes tradition, a China Central Television (CCTV) producer sent me out last summer to the planned “Jade River” real estate redevelopment for some investigative reporting on the fate of Beijing’s historic hutongs or alleyways. I was …
