Fall 2025

When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America by Ira Katznelson

In a rundown, dirt-stained building in El Alto, Bolivia, five young men sit behind a rickety linoleum-topped table on an auditorium stage. A rainbow banner—known locally as the Wiphala, a flag representing half a millennium of indigenous resistance—hangs on the …

On a cold winter afternoon in 1960, my wife and I pored over blueprints in the Grand Street office of the United Housing Federation, a nonprofit foundation created after the war with the support of organized labor to build middle-income …

When I hear professional critics, or my students, bemoan the commodification of art, a wave of irritation engulfs me. Yes, yes, I think, we live in a capitalist society where art, like other things, is bought and sold. This is …

On Munich and Moral Ambiguity

Is it possible that our thinking on the question of college access and economic inequality is back to front? At a time when some young Americans are quite literally dying to go to college—the primary reason now cited by young …

This past winter a storm spread across Europe, the Middle East, and beyond ostensibly because of the publication in a Danish newspaper of cartoons depicting Islam’s Prophet, Muhammad. Amid the violence and uproar, an extraordinary statement was published in the …

Susan Jacoby writes under a misconception. I did not advocate that all American progressives should justify their politics by referring to the Sermon on the Mount or other biblical passages that imply that God is just. Rather, my point was …

At a conference, I kept hearing the term “emerging countries.” After awhile I leaned over and asked my neighbor, Noel Ramírez, then president of Nicaragua’s Central Bank, if Nicaragua was an emerging country. He whispered back, “submerging.” Noel was being …

Instant communication has conquered space and time. The gap between the far away and the near-at-hand has dwindled. Only a few years ago, this phenomenon thrilled us. We grew enchanted with our new ways of life, our newly ubiquitous culture. …

I returned to Cuba in January 1999 after an absence of thirty-eight years, accompanied by the ghosts of a past I had never lived and by my twenty-nine-year-old son, who was curious about the place his father had spoken and …

Against Michael Kazin