In 1987, at the outset of the Pit (“Praise the Lord”) scandal, the Reverend Jimmy Swaggart solemnly announced that “the gospel of Jesus Christ has never sunk to such a level as it has today.” Never mind the Inquisition: it …
The night is cold and damp as our weary group finishes a day-long drive. We follow the beaten pickup through back roads for several miles, then up a winding dirt road. We pass a check-in point staffed by camouflage-clad volunteers …
I first came to really know Mike Harrington in 1976 on a lecture tour in India arranged by the USIA for International Women’s Year. My tour included a small conference on “Social Diversity, Economic Inequality and Political Integration” at a …
Categories often exert a tyranny over our perceptions and judgments. An old joke— perhaps it even happened—from the bad old days of McCarthyism tells of a leftist rally in Philadelphia, viciously broken up by the police. A passerby gets caught …
“When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done,” John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1936. A half century later, Keynes’s fear seems just as warranted as …
Everyone remembers the first time he or she heard Michael Harrington speak. Mine was sometime in the early seventies in a drab room at the Catholic Worker house on the Lower East Side. I didn’t know Mike’s history with the …
More insidiously than any other decade in our history, the 1980s have delivered unto us (and into our homes) the promises of past futurists: sit back, relax, and let your fingers do the walking across the universe of simulated experience. …
Where did he get the energy? Apart from his amazing productivity and range of activities, he even looked energetic, like a light bulb. Not having been among his personal friends, I have no intimate insight into this mystery. I observed …
In 1955 Mike came up to Brandeis to confer with the ten members of the progressive political club. There was plenty of left-minded political passion on the campus, but few saw hope for active politics in those Eisenhower years. Mike …
Last year, at about the time a young black man was killed on the streets of Bensonhurst, Cardinal Glemp, the Roman Catholic primate of Poland, abrogated an agreement to relocate a convent from the site of Auschwitz. Aside from being …
I didn’t know Michael Harrington personally, but in the public man I felt I had a special and elegant friend. First and last, I admired the lucid power and moral clarity of his prose, a legacy that will endure beyond …
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 …
Income inequality in the United States is growing with alarming speed. The biggest beneficiaries of this trend are those who least need it, the super-rich, while the most severe victims are those who can least afford it, children. As Leonard …
The passions unleashed by Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses seem at first glance to be a perfect example of what the novel itself identifies as postmodern sensibility, that of a society capable only of pastiche, which cultivates “the image instead …
The rich diversity of American fiction has always made newness difficult to characterize. But the 1980s have seen not only the arrival of fresh work by writers who have long established that diversity, but also the fracturing of literary culture …
