We need a progressive agenda for human rights that is more than a knee-jerk response to the multinationals that are shaping post-cold war foreign policy. To protect its own profitability, business opposes economic sanctions against human rights violators. But this …
I love museums, but I don’t expect to get deliriously excited in them. However, the Museum of Modern Art’s “Picasso and Portraiture” exhibit last summer knocked me out. Thousands of people jammed the place, and circled and spiraled through it …
Todd Gitlin seems more worried than I am about the political impact of English departments and art galleries. To my delight, however, on most other issues we seem to agree: that the achievements of group-specific movements are many and overdue, …
It is a banal historical truth that the working class played a crucial role in the bourgeois revolutions of continental Europe. Oskar Lange’s comments on the subject are especially perceptive: After the war, when the remnants of the ancien regime …
I recently asked a young Brazilian in Rio de Janeiro how President Fernando Henrique Cardoso was doing. “Oh, he is doing fine.” A pause. “It is the rest of us who are not doing so well.” This beguiling response can …
As we near century’s end, Americans can see the entire middle third of this century, from the early 1930s to the end of the 1960s, as a unified whole. We might well call it “The Age of Social Reform,” a …
Despite last year’s run-up in gasoline prices, the energy outlook for the United States appears positive. Adjusted for inflation, gas prices remain near their historic lows, supplies seem adequate, and while some commentators point to growing demand in India and …
In his 1997 inauguration speech President Bill Clinton said: “Our hopes, our hearts, our hands are with those on every continent who are build- ing democracy and freedom. Their cause is America’s cause.” That, unfortunately, is not true. The despots …
The Dayton accords are in trouble. Their only virtue—it is not a small one—is that they stopped the organized fighting in the former Yugoslavia. But they also partitioned Bosnia and left the consequences of “ethnic cleansing” intact. The major war …
People from Central Europe like to tell jokes. For years, jokes offered them asylum. In the world of jokes, they not only felt free and sovereign, despite captivity and Soviet domination, they also laughed. So: two men, with the experience …
Adam Michnik’s introspective and witty “Gray is Beautiful” characteristically possesses broader significance than its putative subject, the shift from “tests of captivity” to “tests of freedom” in postcommunist Europe. He scrutinizes the limits of the civil-society-oriented dreams of his fellow …
Just under ten years ago, a group of socialist and liberal intellectuals in London, fed up with the left-wing splits that had given Margaret Thatcher a hammerlock on power with barely 40 percent of the vote, got together to produce …
In 1992, Bill Clinton was elected president with 43 percent of the vote. In 1994, the Democratic congressional coalition collapsed and the Democrats were swept out of power in the House and the Senate. At that point, many said that …
Last October I climbed to the roof of a decrepit apartment building in Managua’s eastern quarter. Originally a roost of the wealthy during the Somoza regime, it was mangled by the 1972 earthquake that leveled much of Nicaragua’s capital. Today, …
Glen Jeansonne’s investigation of the “America First” mothers’ movement, a massive network of ultraright isolationist women’s organizations that flourished in the Midwest and on both coasts from 1939 until the bombing of Pearl Harbor, is an informative and often shocking …
