Winter 2026

Against Michael Kazin

Search Order What are these gentlemen looking for in my house? What is this officer doing reading the sheet of paper on which I’ve written the words “ambition,” “lightness,” and “brittle”? What hint of conspiracy speaks to him from the …

The French commitment to the thirty-five-hour work week.

This past November, the Cuban poet and journalist Raúl Rivero made what I believe was his first public appearance in New York City. Rivero was for awhile a leading journalist of the Cuban state—the Moscow correspondent during the 1970s for …

Iraq and Increased Legitimacy for International Trusteeship

Why won’t the Democrats learn from Kansas?

Most political biographers choose a subject whom they either admire or loathe. They then spend years attempting to understand what, for example, made Martin Luther King, Jr., an inspiring leader of the black freedom struggle or drove Stalin to order …

Karl Widerquist looks at John Maynard Keynes’s essay

The unhappy parallels between America’s “long hot summer” and France’s recent upheavals

When Barrington Moore, Jr., died October 16 at age ninety-two, I remembered the mandatory meetings for coffee he scheduled with students at the place he called “the greasy spoon down the block” in Harvard Square. At the time—1966 and 1967—I …

Khans, kings, and conquerors—these are the leaders Afghans have mostly known. The legacies of Alexander the Macedonian, Genghis Khan, the Soviet Army, the Mujahadin, and finally the Taliban and Osama bin Laden share one feature: leadership based on power and …

“The man who first flung a word of abuse at an enemy instead of a spear was the founder of civilization.” Sigmund Freud once quoted this adage with approval, and its (apocryphal) point is plain enough. But its insufficiency as …