On August 18, 1994 President Saddam Hussein promulgated Law 109. It read: “According to Section 1, Article 42, of the Iraqi Constitution, the Revolutionary Command Council has decreed that . . . the foreheads of those individuals who repeat the …
A seemingly offhand personal note toward the end of this slim but remarkable volume of political theory conveys the earthy origins of an abstract egalitarian impulse. As the child of a bourgeois Italian family, Norberto Bobbio recalls how he would …
San Jose, Costa Rica : The telephone rang; Danilo said, “Hello.” “This is Bam-Bam. I hear you have lost something.” “Yes, my car was stolen.” “If you authorize me, if you authorize me, I will look for it, providing that …
Since January the American media have been obsessed with sex, scandal, and lurid sensationalism in an unprecedented way. This has baffled and amused outside observers, especially Europeans, who are always ready to sneer at this country’s “puritanical” and hypocritical attitudes …
News from the affirmative action battle front: two members of the top brass have deserted the hard-line opposition. Nathan Glazer, who crusaded against affirmative action for more than two decades, has switched sides. Glenn Loury, who broke with the neoconservatives …
The situation of African Americans is so complex that one is tempted to remark that chaos theoreticians are needed to diagnose it. For instance, Professor John J. DiIulio of Princeton, echoing data from Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom’s America in Black …
In March 1997, when the body of Cheddi Jagan, former president of Guyana, lay in state near the tiny village where he was born, the crowds of villagers and sugar workers streaming past to catch a last glimpse of their …
A few years ago I visited the champagne cellar of Piper-Heidsieck in Reims, a city in eastern France. At the entrance there is a plaque proclaiming that the cellar had been dedicated by Marie Antoinette. At the end of the …
Dennis Wrong presents a laundry list of arguments that have been brought up by critics of tenure. He seems to favor replacing tenure with a more market-driven system that would get rid of all those incompetents in our midst. At …
The threats we face today as Americans respect no nation’s borders. Think of them: terrorism, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, organized crime, drug trafficking, ethnic and religious hatred, aggression by rogue states, environmental degradation.” This passage from Bill …
In his essay “Tenure Trouble” (Dissent, Winter 1998), Jon Wiener presents much too narrow a view of the rising opposition to academic tenure, its rationale, and causes. Following Wiener’s precedent, let me disclose that I was a tenured faculty member …
Cold New World does what certain novels used to do: reveal the moral condition of a time and place by telling stories on a large, intimate scale. Near the end of his book, William Finnegan introduces what in fiction would …
The Vatican statement on the Shoah* addresses two questions: Why didn’t Church authorities speak out against the murder of the European Jews? And is there a relationship between Christian anti-Judaism and Nazi anti-Semitism? It is still unclear why Pope Pius …
Taylor branch’s new volume is a major achievement—a product of prodigious research and a gift for storytelling on an epic scale. Taken together with his earlier Pulitzer Prize–winning Parting the Waters and his projected third volume, At Canaan’s Edge, Branch’s …
On July 2, 1977, a seventeen-year-old boy set fire to an abandoned tenement building on New York City’s Lower East Side. This fire was just a flicker in an enormous mid-1970s arson wave that struck New York’s poorest neighborhoods; it …
