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 …
Walter A. O’Brien, Jr. Photo courtesy of Julia O’Brien-Merrill On a clear, chilly day in November 2004, then-Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney stood inside a large white tent set up on the brick plaza outside Boston City Hall. Romney wasn’t there …
How do we know when something starts or when a new phenomenon becomes a major trend? We don’t have a “big bang” theory for the “second wave” of the women’s movement. The common wisdom has been that it began when …
Barry Gewen’s review of Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise (Winter 2008) contains a factual error that illustrates the flaw in his argument. He describes the Beatles song “Norwegian Wood” as having a “pentatonic melody”—a melody restricted to five notes—which …
Since September 11, 2001, we have been fighting the so-called “war on terror” without the active participation of all three branches of government. For the first several years, a very aggressive president acted alone, without Congress or the Supreme Court. …
In early September 1968, American feminism announced its arrival to the nation, when a hundred women demonstrators from New York traveled down to Atlantic City to disrupt the Miss America pageant. The protest on the boardwalk was more or less …
A Dubious Normalcy
A well-known political scientist once declared that the definition of the alternatives is the supreme instrument of power. The simple question—single-payer or not—conceals major differences over whether to frame the health care issue primarily as an economic question or a …
From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture’s Encounter with the American City by Nathan Glazer Princeton University Press, 2007, 310 pp., $24.95 Like many utopian visions that someone is crazy enough to attempt to realize, modernist architecture has always …
Here’s a secret, the kind we hardly acknowledge to ourselves. But first, you may be wondering who this “we” is, on whose behalf I am writing. In truth, I am not sure. Maybe it is the Jews. But the problem …
Nineteen-sixty-eight has become a political myth that won’t go away. The debate on its interpretation continues and continues. The year marks a historical break, comparable to the beginning of the cold war or the fall of the Berlin Wall. Making …
One Sunday morning in December 2007, some three hundred extreme nationalists dressed in black uniforms marched in military formation through a Hungarian village, protesting against what they called “Roma [Gypsy] delinquency.” They then gathered at a rally, where speakers demanded …
[T]he hospitality of southerners is so profuse, that taverns are but poorly supported. A traveler, with the garb and the manners of a gentleman, finds a welcome at every door. A stranger is riding on horseback through Virginia or Carolina. …
It was opposition to the Vietnam War that filled my time and occupied my mind in 1967 and ’68. I was one of the organizers of Vietnam Summer in ’67 and then of the Cambridge Neighborhood Committee on the War …
