Fall 2024

Say what you will about Ronald Reagan, he seems never to have supposed that we live in a time marked by “the end of ideology.” It’s also true that he may never have heard of the phrase. But with those intuitive …

The jacket of this book presents an image that its text carefully challenges: a 1937 photograph of a Munich street shows a crowd ecstatically saluting Nazi leaders on parade; underlining the apparent conformity, two small children ape their elders, ranged …

The history of the last half-millennium can be written as the story of rising classes, each pronouncing itself a universal class that embodies the general good. More narrowly, just as Virginia gentlemen stressed the virtues of breeding and farmers extolled …

I saw prophets tearing at their pasted-on beards I saw imposters joining sects of flagellants butchers disguised in sheepskin who fled the anger of the people playing on a block flute I saw I saw I saw a man who …

When President Carter appointed Andrew Young ambassador to the United Nations, a new era began. For the first time in this century, a key figure in the foreign-policy establishment was Afro-American, with his writ extending especially to African affairs. Young’s …

Two young, politically engaged film-makers, Julia Reichert and James Klein, with one successful documentary (Union Maids) to their credit; a subject full of human and political complexity; seven years in preparation, including 400 interviews (only about a dozen make it …

It is an appalling visitation. You turn on the television and watch the president of the United States. He delivers his right-thinking homilies, fudges his ignorance, composes his chuckles, strains to summon a fact or two from failing memory banks …

Information comes second-hand, and it varies as to details. Fifty or more members of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers’ party have been expelled, most of them old-timers. Apparently there were many differences, but what seems to have precipitated the expulsions is …

Anatoly Marchenko is one of the most extraordinary individuals to have emerged in Soviet society. Both his parents ate illiterate railroad workers, and Marchenko himself, who was born in 1938, has only an eighth-grade education. But after spending six years …

On March 10, 1983, Jerusalem police prevented four armed men from ascending the Temple Mount, the site where the Temple stood, sacred to Jews and Muslims. The four men, yeshivah students, had intended to perform a Passover sacrifice there. The …

Placing Central American struggles on the line of East-West conflict is not simply a compass error, to be corrected by a truer North-South heading. It is a basic mistake. It means to ignore the simultaneous ferment of three processes that have …

A principal feature of recent neoconservative thought has been the scapegoating of democracy for a host of political and economic ills—from declining governmental competence to budget deficits and inflation. Our political system, the argument goes, has become “overloaded” by demands …

The nuclear weapons debate reminds us once again of how well-intentioned scientific advances may grant human beings such vast powers that they endanger our fundamental political and social values. The specter of such power has haunted the development of recombinant …