“[P]assions without truth, truths without passion; heroes without heroic deeds, history without events; development, whose sole driving force seems to be the calendar, wearying with constant repetition of the same tensions and relaxations; antagonisms that periodically seem to work themselves …
Too Much Logic, Too Little Evidence
Harold Hongju Koh tells the Senate about legal responsibility and torture
My political radicalism was a by-product of growing up in South Africa—of the liberalism of my mother and the communist leanings of my father. South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s was a strange and terrible place. Young white people …
“Whatever Dissent‘s problems,” Irving Howe once said to me in the 1980s, “we at least have two of the most literate economists alive.” He was referring to Robert Lekachman and Robert Heilbroner. Bob Heilbroner was a man of prodigious energy. …
There is a paradox at the heart of contemporary American environmentalism. On the one hand, its organizations are generally larger, stronger, better funded, and more knowledgeable than ever before. Membership has grown in recent years; there are now more than …
The experts have apparently agreed that it wasn’t values that lost us the last election. It was passion, and above all, it was the passion of fear. But maybe frightened people look for strong leaders, whose strength is revealed in …
Virtue, Markets, and the Family
Susan Sontag, who died in December at age seventy-one, was a brave intellectual; but her bravery was not just intellectual. In 1989, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sentenced Salman Rushdie and his publishers to death, a great many people all over …
Running as a social democrat for the Senate in the Czech Republic is not for the timid. In my district, four voters out of five stoutly affirm social democratic values and virulently reject social democratic candidates. After forty years of …
States’ rights have long seemed to go hand in hand with conservatism. But this need not be the case. What would a progressive federalism look like?
American Views on Personal Morality and the Law
Bush’s Budget and the Gutting of Social Security
The Year of the Biopic
Is It Time to Amend the Constitution?
