A debate is now going forward—sometimes raging, sometimes smoldering—over the kind of curriculum that should be offered to college students in literature and the humanities generally. For example, core humanities classes are sometimes offered to freshmen and sophomores as a …
As socially concerned people in labor unions, women’s organizations, welfare rights associations, church organizations, aboriginal groups, and other community associations, we are alarmed by signs of deepening social crisis in Canada today. Plant shutdowns, farm bankruptcies, business failures, and abandoned …
Many sociologists deny there is a ruling class. Paul Fussell says there is one—but it is “top out of sight.” Albert Gore, George Bush, Robert Dole, and Richard Gephardt accused each other of belonging to it but wouldn’t be caught …
Aleksander Wat was born in Warsaw in 1900 to a family of Polish Jewish intelligentsia. As a young man he was a founder of the Polish futurist literary movement; in 1929 he became editor of the communist magazine The Literary …
To speak the truth: that is the most urgent item on the next president’s agenda. We have been lied to, systematically and patronizingly, ever since the Gulf of Tonkin incident, deceived, manipulated, flattered and lulled by illusions. Call it glasnost, …
The best thing Jesse Jackson did during the Democratic primary was to name the problems. He was the one Democratic candidate who stressed that there are serious social wrongs in the United States requiring more than superficial treatment. He offered …
Some conservatives believe that when Ronald Reagan leaves office he will take the conservative movement with him into retirement. Kevin Phillips, author of Post-Conservative America, writes, “The tides that began launching the conservative era twenty years ago are old and …
Those of us who have been alive for seventy years or more are sometimes visited with a strange impulse: to take the middle-aged and the young in a firm grip and urge them to listen to the stories of our …
Two questions inform Sandy Levinson’s essay. He asks (a) why we should respect and obey the law, particularly when there is so often a tension between morality and law, and (b) by what authority judges impose their will on the …
Much of the contemporary debate about constitutional interpretation is carried on in the language of accountability. Constitutional interpretation is, after all, an “accounting” for a particular result that one views as required by the Constitution. And the overarching debate among …
Jesse Jackson’s 1988 campaign marks a historic breakthrough in American politics. It is the first time that a “social democratic” platform has been presented in the mainstream of American politics and attracted significant mass support. The journalistic cliché was, and …
The fortieth anniversary of India’s independence, on August 15, 1987, passed with relatively little fanfare, even in India. There was a small parade in New Delhi; Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi gave a long dull speech lampooned by pundits for its …
What strikes you first, and shocks you, is that no one knows how to work. In the land of the workers, people are at best semiliterate in labor. They work reluctantly, irritably, listlessly. Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow is the gateway …
The late French philosopher is squatting in the corridor. He is gazing, with his one good eye, through a keyhole out at the world. Perched forward, squinting, he is aware solely of the aperture and what he sees through it; …
It was not the speech Martin Luther King planned to give. He wanted his contribution to the March on Washington to be brief, “sort of a Gettysburg Address.” He would, he knew, be following a long list of speakers. A …
