In 1913, when a member of the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations asked him how Pullman porters were supposed to live on $27.50 per month, L.S. Hungerford, Pullman’s general manager, replied: “All I can say is that you can get …
A kind of euphoria surrounded this summer’s UAW picket lines in Flint, Michigan. Nearly everyone who drove past the lines honked a horn or pumped a fist in solidarity; hardly an hour went by without a restaurant van pulling up …
I find the word “recuse” poignant. It seems weighty, official–perspicacious rather than apologetic. “Excuse me” sounds as if there is something to be pardoned, even if that is not necessarily so. A little like pleading the Fifth Amendment. But if …
If memoirs are always full of lies—and they always are—the measure of a good memoirist is how well she tricks us. Of course, all texts are slippery; it would be foolish to suggest that memoirists are amoral or immoral or …
Some advanced thinkers would like to deprive us of the distinction between left and right, but a world that is getting more unequal and insecure, more divided and dangerous, belies such talk. There have always been issues and policies that …
From the very beginning of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic nineteenth-century novel The Scarlet Letter, it is easy to hate the Puritans he so carefully describes. They are not simply content to make his heroine, Hester Prynne, wear a scarlet A because …
There is—or used to be—a high unprotected railroad trestle on the outskirts of Ann Arbor. Narrow, constructed of massive beams, it was straight out of a cinematographer’s imagination, just the sort of place that a romantically suicidal undergraduate would think …
It is perhaps a sign of living uneasily in the here and now that we spend so much time looking backward and forward. We find our way in the difficult present by focusing on the past and the future. So, …
Like citizens in many other countries, Americans are debating issues of multiculturalism. But the debate in the United States has a special importance because of the profound influence of American ideas around the world. Unfortunately, this influence has not been …
Recent coverage of Chinese events demonstrates that the American media’s strange love-hate relationship with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is alive and well. Now, as in the past, we see shifts between periods when China is presented as a …
There is a certain romantic attraction in the history of lost causes. The losers are usually nicer guys; in the case of the Russian Mensheviks, they were the humanitarian shadow of communist inhumanity. But the Mensheviks’ fate was not a …
Was F.R. Leavis Britain’s New York Intellectual? Though not Jewish himself, his wife and constant collaborator, Queenie Roth Leavis, was; and he was often taken for a Jew, described by one Cambridge undergraduate as dressing and speaking “like a member …
Last fall, Le Livre noir du Communisme: Crimes, terreur, répression (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1997, 850 pp.), a massive compendium of the crimes perpetrated by communist regimes created a public sensation in France and quickly became a bestseller. The controversy over …
Antipersonnel land mines epitomize the vulnerability and risk experienced by many inhabitants of the late modern world. The product of extraordinary scientific ingenuity and scrupulousness, conceived as an inexpensive and efficient means of controlling territory and constricting the movement of …
Fernando Rodríguez is clean shaven, but he makes a pulling motion under his chin as if he’s stroking a long beard.* It’s one of the many euphemisms Cubans use for Fidel Castro. “Este tozudo cumple setenta y dos años el …
