From field notes on city life: A woman is seriously injured by a mugger who follows her to an apartment door and snatches her purse. A couple out for an evening returns to find the apartment burglarized. A 13-year-old car, …
No one said: we will now establish a welfare state. The phrase “welfare state”—that is, a state assuming some direct responsibility for the socioeconomic welfare of its citizens—was not commonly used in the early 1930s. What characterized the Roosevelt administration …
I have been working in Poland as a free-lance journalist for longer than I care to recall, and certainly for longer than the brief period of Solidarity’s legal existence. I was there when martial law was imposed, and I had …
Information and data collections, which in part guide our social and economic policies, tend to focus on the most obvious problems of society and on issues for which data can be readily collected. For example, unemployment data are easier to …
June 8, 1982: There is a feeling of security that comes from the mighty power we have at our disposal, and from a desire to be at the center of events. Despite this, I’m bothered by the lack of any …
A specter is haunting Europe. It is not a “classic” revolution, with a Communist party storming the Winter Palace. This specter is a peaceful, incremental socialist transformation carried out by ballots, not bullets: a “tranquil revolution,” in the words of …
Things are grim in South Chicago. Two years ago, Wisconsin Steel went bankrupt, leaving 4,000 steelworkers without jobs, pension plans, and their last paycheck. Then Pullman Standard closed, after United Steelworkers of America District Director Jack Parton’s frantic efforts to …
“I must write a piece on feminism, family and community,” Jean Bethke Elshtain declaims in her opening sentence. And, alas, since she has, so must I. If only she had published her rambling, pretentious essay somewhere else, like Commentary or, …
The electoral victory of Menachem Begin in June 1981 (however marginal in voting terms) apparently opened a new era in the history of the state of Israel. In the first Likud government, which came to office in 1977, Begin was …
As a child growing up in Ohio, I thought of the Cleveland Browns as gods. In that belief I was no different from most of my school friends. Our fall Sundays were spent watching the Browns on television or, if …
In The Emperor (which will be published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich this winter and from which we here reprint several excerpts), Ryszard Kapuscinski recounts the career of Haile Selassie from the primitive barbarism of his early years on the throne …
Outcast groups vary historically in their composition and in the political meanings and symbols attached to them. What we observe about one group of outcasts, the homeless in New York City, finds its reflections on a historical screen of alternating …
Since the publication of E. Franklin Frazier’s brilliant book Black Bourgeoisie in 1957, this class of blacks has acquired a new prominence in both American and Afro-American life. The size of the black bourgeoisie surpasses anything Frazier could have imagined; …
Habent sua fata libelli—”books have their own fates.” It will be interesting to know what the fate of Milan Kundera’s first novel, The Joke, will be in the United States, now that it has at last been published in English …
As we go into the 1982 elections, we face two related but separate sets of questions: (1) Will Democrats make significant gains in House elections and either weaken the GOP majority in the Senate or eliminate that majority altogether? And, …
