Long-time readers of the New Yorker may recall cartoon-style ads for the now-defunct Philadelphia Bulletin. An odd little man in a crowd points in horror at some impending disaster while all around him remain oblivious, absorbed in the Bulletin. There …
I remember the evening I discovered that Edith Tarcov was an unusual woman. An article I’d written for Dissent had been accepted but not yet set in type. One night at about ten I received a phone call from Edith. …
Bands of roughly dressed country folk were marching—or sliding—along the icy streets of Sofia with the Bulgarian tricolor in their hands. Their placards denounced the “decision of December 29,” called for a general strike, and demanded a referendum on “the …
As immigration swelled at the end of the nineteenth century, the nation’s “real” Americans dug in their heels and created an oddly romantic and destructive notion of democracy called the “melting pot theory,” which they applied relentlessly to immigrant schoolchildren. …
Anyone who follows, even from a distance, the discussions now taking place among political thinkers in the Soviet Union, and who also remembers something about the history of Russian radicalism, must be experiencing an uncanny feeling. It’s as if the …
Looking through the American Communist party’s (CP) paper, the People’s Daily World, is like entering into the twilight zone—a place where reality is suspended. During a time when Stalinism has collapsed throughout Eastern Europe, the headlines of the paper have …
However admirable China’s democracy movement may have been last June (1989), its goals should not be confused with what we call “democracy” in the West. The Beijing Goddess of Democracy may have looked like the Statue of Liberty, but the …
George Bush wants to be the “education president” without spending money on education. Last year he achieved a “presence” on this issue by stealing the Democrats’ idea of an “Education Summit.” This is part of a “let them eat rhetoric” …
For whose benefit did President Bush invade Panama? How does it affect this country that Bush did not consult Congress? Will the invasion result in better living conditions for Latin America? Will it further long-run objectives of peace, justice, freedom? …
Women Analyze Women: In France, England, and the United States by Elaine Hoffman Baruch and Lucienne J. Serrano New York University Press, 1988 The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination by Jessica Benjamin Pantheon Books, 1988 …
The Reagan era has bequeathed to us much, including, ironically, a new version of the materialist theory of the politics of culture. The essential claim of this theory is seductively simple: cultural expression reproduces, through all the appropriate “mediations,” the …
The recent political changes in Europe are so extensive, indeed, so astonishing that all of us have “fallen behind” in our thinking. It’s unavoidable. So let me here put down some quite obvious points, with no pretense to originality or …
The following dialogue between Abraham Brumberg and Irving Howe took place in early October 1989. Abraham Brumberg is a widely published authority on Soviet and Eastern European affairs and editor of the forthcoming Perestroika: Chronicle of a Revolution, published by …
Manhattan was first glitzed in late 1979 when developer Harry Helmsley and architects Emery Roth & Sons began making over a block-long property on Madison Avenue between 50th and 51st Streets. Under their direction, a mansion designed by McKim, Mead …
Talkin’ Socialism: J. A. Wayland and the Role of the Press in American Radicalism, 1890-1912 by Elliott Shore University Press of Kansas, 1988, 280 pp., $25.00 Few problems have troubled U.S. historians more than the question Werner Sombart posed in …
