“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” This famous line, spoken by O’Brien to the battered Winston Smith in Orwell’s 1984, embodies the fear so many felt in the aftermath of …
When Charles Murray’s attack on the welfare system, Losing Ground, was published in 1984, it drew a great deal of attention. With the conservative Manhattan Institute bankrolling an artful public relations campaign, Murray and his ideas were soon being widely …
The “leveraged buyout,” dramatized last fall by the struggle over RJR Nabisco and the $25 billion paid by a Wall Street firm mostly through debt instruments, has been only part of the wave of mergers and acquisitions, by far the …
We have long been accustomed to think of nationalism as a secular creed, opposed to earlier religious faiths. Our image of nationalism is shaped by the French Revolution, that first great eruption of patriotic forces that reverberated throughout Europe and …
Taylor Branch’s massive Parting the Waters aspires to be “a history of the civil rights movement” formed out of “knitting together a number of personal stories,” first and foremost that of Martin Luther King, Jr. Branch emphasizes that the book …
The war on drugs is entering its twentieth year. On October 24, 1969, President Richard Nixon called a press conference to issue the initial declaration of war. Every president since has escalated the hostilities. President-elect Bush promises to do the …
Joan Didion, in a needle-sharp piece in the New York Review of Books, describes Michael Dukakis outside his campaign plane on a broiling day, playing catch with a baseball. Every reporter and every television crew participant knows the action is …
Something must be at stake in the edgy debates circulating around and about something called postmodernism. What, then? Commentators pro, con, serious, fey, academic, and accessible seem agreed that something postmodern has happened, even if we are all (or virtually …
Some thirty years ago in these pages, William L. Neumann registered an eloquent protest against the acquiescence of American academics to the conservative temper of their time. “Today’s American historian probably reflects his age more completely than in any previous …
Mass popular and nationalist demonstrations throughout the Republic of Serbia, an inflation reaching over 230 percent, faltering economic performance, and growing public acrimony within the ruling party, the League of Communists (LCY)—these are a few symptoms of the current crisis …
The year of the stock market crash, 1987, was also the year of the intellectual crisis. Afterward the stock market seemed to right itself, but that can’t be said about the world of thought. Intellectual crises tend to be that …
On a recent morning in Lhasa a lone Western tourist was strolling through the dim, centuries-old corridors of Jokang Temple, the holiest shrine of contemporary Tibetan Buddhism. An accompanying guide recited the histories of the magnificent thangka paintings adorning the …
The finest body of historical writing to appear during the past twenty years has probably been produced by students of slavery and emancipation. An outpouring of exceptional studies by scholars in the United States, Brazil, Cuba, and other countries has …
In the past fifteen years, the health of the local economy has become the pressing urban policy issue. Although the older manufacturing cities are most in need of an energetic policy, the issue is a top priority for virtually every …
Consider the teachers’ strikes which have become a familiar part of the opening of the school year around the United States every September. Negotiations stall. The union sets a strike date. The school superintendent places a notice in the local …
