Doug Anglin isn’t likely to flash across the radar screen at an Ivy League admissions office. A seventeen-year-old senior at Milton High School, a suburb outside Boston, Anglin has a B-minus average and plays soccer and baseball. But he’s done …
In 2005, China experienced more than seventy five thousand public protests in rural villages and urban factories. These bursts of discontent appear to have made a deep impression on China’s party leaders. As in nineteenth-century Europe, the specter of revolution …
In 1994, activist groups mounted a unified campaign against the World Bank and its sister organization, the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The two institutions were then celebrating a half-century in business, having been founded at the Bretton Woods conference near …
We may be young, but we don’t have the luxury of feeling invincible. When one ambulance ride, hospital visit, or even prescription could mean financial ruin, the young and uninsured have to live carefully. Our situation is precarious, and we …
Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education, by Danielle S. Allen
This Thanksgiving 2006 will witness the anniversary almost to the day ninety-seven years ago, when the immigrant shopgirls of New York’s shirtwaist factories called a general strike. This past April, and then on May Day, immigrant workers, 120 years after …
The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam by Ayaan Hirsi Ali Simon & Schuster, 2006, 208 pp., $16.99 This lightweight book is being reviewed everywhere because of the following intensely engaging facts: Its author, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, was …
In March 2003, Newsweek pronounced George W. Bush’s presidency the “most resolutely ‘faith based’ in modern times.” This judgment is plausible enough to merit serious consideration but it is self-evidently true only if modern times began on January 20, 1989, …
In heaven, possibly, ideals speak for themselves. But on earth ideals require translation; they require action. If the world were logically ordered, politics would begin with ends—so Plato and Aristotle would insist. But a little experience demonstrates that the ends …
The Lost Executioner: A Story of the Khmer Rouge by Nic Dunlop and Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak by Jean Hatzfeld, translated by Linda Coverdale
New Orleans has been challenging the limits of taste for over a century now. It is the city of Mardi Gras, of decadence, romance, stylish bohemianism, and, on Bourbon Street, unadulterated raunchiness. One might think that nothing could offend the …
Seventy years ago this October, before he was famous as a novelist, John Steinbeck published a seven-part series in the San Francisco News on the Dust Bowl families pouring into California to start new lives. Today, the 1936 series is …
China did not qualify for the 2006 World Cup, yet there was almost fanatical enthusiasm for the games in Beijing. Because the matches were played in the middle of the night, many Beijingers slept during the day. This gave a …
Al Gore’s global-warming slideshow, An Inconvenient Truth, is now one of the top-grossing documentaries of all time; by the time you are reading this, it’s likely to have settled in at #3, behind Fahrenheit 9/11 and March of the Penguins. …
The relationship between democracy and the economy has always been contested terrain. In Russia, many people, including intellectuals, do not see democracy as important to economic reconstruction. They are unconcerned by President Vladimir Putin’s steady elimination of the content, if …
