Here is a book that is easier to praise and to agree with than to review and to criticize. Its main theme is simple, right, and rather mysteriously neglected on all sides: the “culture wars” have been an enormous diversion …
When candidate Bill Clinton pledged to “end welfare as we know it,” that statement essentially summed up the current state of poverty politics. In recent years, it has become politically advantageous to promise to end welfare. On the other hand, …
In all the discussion of sending the children of welfare mothers to orphanages, it seems to have escaped attention that an immoral use of the English language is involved. An orphan has never meant anything but a child whose parents …
Cuban affairs drew many headlines in 1994. Spring marked the beginning of a headlong cascade of events: a bungled attempt by the Havana regime to stage a dialogue with moderate exiles in April, a mass exodus of Cuban balseros (rafters) …
I do not see why Steven Lukes thinks that the left’s “pursuit of a commitment [to fighting injustice] . . . can be recognized only because it has advanced successive but distinctive visions or theories of justice and of the …
Logically one should have expected that the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and its satellites would liberate ideas of democratic control of our economic destiny from the onus of association with the militarized despotism that the Soviets called …
Sometimes I worry that after I die I’ll find myself in an office, sitting across from a man who has a printout showing how I spent every minute of my life. He isn’t using the information to decide my fate. …
Revisionist scholarship on Freud has become a total assault on his achievement. If it were to succeed, virtually nothing would be left to value in his work. What would remain is a view of his legacy as a poison in …
Holding opinions in a treacherous business for a woman. Shrill! Silly! Imprecations and accusations lurk at the edges of life and female psychology, fueling prejudices and women’s own self-censorship. Feminist writer Naomi Wolf recently called attention to how little women’s …
At the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where I work, the person in charge of the maintenance of photocopiers is a middle-aged recent immigrant from Russia named Ya’kov. He arrived in Israel in 1990 and has been with us for some …
As we approach the millennial year 2000, there seems to be a general expectation that the twenty-first century will be the Pacific Century. After about two thousand years of European centered civilization as we know it (in philosophy, religion, and …
Republican ideologues are fighting a new cold war. Their enemy is the “corrosive liberal ethos” and the government that it supports. They believe that Ronald Reagan and George Bush failed, because government, or some semblance of it, still exists. This …
At the beginning of the year, the political news in the United States was totally dominated by the results of the November elections: the takeover of Congress by the Republicans and in particular the installation of Newt Gingrich as Speaker …
If this were a nineteenth-century book and not a modern magazine, the last few entries of a lengthy, cluttered index might appear right here, listing every conceivable and inconceivable topic along with the appropriate page number. We see very few …
Four weeks after the 1994 elections former liberal, former senator, and former presidential hopeful Paul Tsongas proclaimed the need for a third party and invited Colin Powell to be its standard bearer. The Boston Globe then ran a cartoon with …
