Few things are less predictable than the vagaries of reputation. The role of Malcolm X in the racial dramas of the sixties was comparatively minor and his influence while alive, negligible. To have suggested in 1964 that within ten years …
After dark in Port-au-Prince the only people on the streets are the desperate, the vicious, and those with private cars. As my Haitian friend drove through the city center, he gave me a tour guide’s narration of the night sights. …
Reform of the nation’s primary system of cash aid to the poor—Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)—is again on the political agenda. That this is happening so soon after the last wave of reform (which resulted in the Family …
Prognostications about media and society generally oscillate between two poles: to the north, one hears dithyrambs to a projected utopia offering fingertip access to all the information and images a citizen might need to enrich democracy and multiply freedom beyond …
Last September, while in Angola as an election observer, I met a young soldier in the Angolan army named Raul. Sporting green fatigues and an AK-47, he told me that he was on duty even though it was his birthday. …
What boggles the mind is not the pervasiveness of corruption in Italian society, but its thorough institutionalization. So when magistrates exposed the nature of the rot (their ongoing inquiry began in early 1992), perhaps no one should have been surprised …
In a perfect world, the media wizards who spawned Willie Horton would be out of business. But these propagandists are just one feature of a larger crisis of democratic capitalism: the interpenetration of politics, television, entertainment, and wealth. The mixture …
Margaret Thatcher managed to persuade the world at large, and conventional opinion in the United States, that her government had engineered the economic recovery and social transformation of Britain. That was a carefully contrived illusion, and for a while it …
Some fifteen years ago, in his book The Declining Significance of Race, the sociologist William Julius Wilson argued that the destruction of Jim Crow in the American South and the changes brought about by the civil rights movement had given …
There are many who will view Tony Judt’s Past Imperfect as a rearguard action. After all, the moral condemnation of French intellectuals for their utter credulity about communism in the late 1940s and the early 1950s is about as challenging …
When Michael Harrington’s The Other America began to win a large audience after its publication in 1962, both he and his friends were very much surprised. I remember thinking that Mike’s book, fine as it was, would probably be numbered …
Our friend and comrade Irving Howe is dead. The world knew him as the leading intellectual of the American left, a voice (often, a voice in the wilderness) for democratic and socialist values. We knew him differently. He was our …
The veneration that surrounds the name of Franklin D. Roosevelt causes us to forget that, in his time, not everybody loved the man. To some of his opponents, he was downright evil. It was bad enough that this country squire …
In 1984, IBM, the largest and most advanced technology firm in the world, made after-tax profits of almost $7 billion. No other company in the world had ever made so much. Eight years later, in 1992, IBM lost $5 billion, …
It is sometimes said that Yugoslavia disintegrated because of its economic failures. Those who know a bit more talk about the failure of self-management. Still others say that social property was responsible for the failures. Some economists admit that economic …
