As Bill Clinton looked me straight in the eye, tightened his jaw, and denied having sex with “that woman,” I had a fantasy: suppose, on that historic 60 Minutes episode in 1992, he had said, “Yes, I had an affair …
The history of Nikolai Bukharin’s novel is almost certainly unique—even in the dismal twentieth century with its mountain of literature written by people doomed by politics. Normally we would be deeply moved by the tragic fate of the book and …
Among contemporary students of popular culture, a consensus has begun to emerge about American television quite different from the view dominant only a few decades ago. The theorists of “mass society” criticized commercial television from a standpoint informed both by …
If Bill Clinton were impeached or forced to resign over the Lewinsky case, the incident might force a national examination of how men in power treat female subordinates. The most important question his alleged behavior raises, after all, is not …
At the beginning of 1998, accounts of massacres in Algeria horrified world opinion. The start of the holy month of Ramadan brought reports that whole villages had been savagely attacked; men, women, and children were systematically slaughtered. More than seventy …
Massimo D’Alema became the secretary of Italy’s Democratic Party of the Left (PDS) in 1994, when he replaced Achille Occhetto, the party leader who, five years earlier, began the transformation that led to the dissolution of the Italian Communist Party …
In 1935 it was discovered that roughly seven hundred workers had died after drilling tunnels for the Union Carbide corporation at Gauley Bridge, West Virginia. Congressional investigations revealed that hundreds of these workers had been buried outside the tunnels, in …
During the 1997 campaign Alexa McDonough, leader of Canada’s federal social democrats, announced her ambitions for the election. She did not expect to form the government nor even to become the official opposition. Her first goal was simply to make …
No longer is the ability to produce goods and services in large volume confined to a handful of countries. We live in an era in which economic development has spread globally. With this heightened productive capacity, many poor countries have …
At the age of six, I already knew that capitalism was in crisis. In the summer of 1930, as my father, Yosef, and I were sitting on a large glacial rock in Bronx Park, our favorite spot for reading and …
Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America by Richard Rorty Harvard University Press, 1998 159 pp $18.95M On behalf of countless readers whose reaction to most left academic writing over the past two decades has increasingly been not so …
Our interview with the leader of the Italian Democratic Party of the Left, Massimo D’Alema, suggests the difficulties faced by European social democracy as it struggles to adjust to, but also to resist, the material and ideological power of the …
Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes by Greil Marcus Henry Holt and Company, 1997 286 pp $22.50 Time out of Mind by Bob Dylan Columbia Records, 1997 Anthology of American Folk Music Harry Smith, ed. Smithsonian/Folkways Recordings, 1997, re-issue 6 …
October 16, 1995, the largest public gathering of African Americans in history took place in Washington, D.C. The participants had come together under the slogan the Million Man March, with an agenda emphasizing racial pride, personal responsibility, and patriarchal family …
Shortly before writing this essay I received a questionnaire from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. It asked that I choose between the Democratic and Republican positions on nine “critical” issues: crime, the balanced budget, environmental protection, campaign-finance reform, education, religious …
