The New Yorker reigns among us as an arbiter of taste. Since the intellectual monthlies and quarterlies lost authority, and the youth culture faded as a trend-setting force, the New Yorker has emerged as a model of what is “best.” …
The French left came to power with roses in the Pantheon, Beethoven in the streets, a president-writer, and a minister of culture who directed plays rather than bureaucracies: a far cry from Giscard under whose reign culture was little more …
When queried by the New York Times‘ John Oakes, Milovan Djilas, age 71, readily conceded that “Socialism is not so clear to me today as when I was young.” It is an appealing feature of the Yugoslav version of communism …
In the months before the 1980 election when voters were asked what the number one issue was, they replied inflation/the economy. When they were asked what should be done, about half supported the balanced-budget proposals of Jimmy Carter, a little …
Mistaken ideas about the historical reality of Latin America have been appearing for almost two centuries. There is not even an exact name to designate this reality: should it be “Latin America,” “Hispanic America,” “Iberoamerica,” “Indoamerica”? Each of these names …
You probably didn’t notice because it was just a small item on a back page in a few papers and was totally absent in most papers and in the electronic media. But this datum tells us just about everything we …
Americans—both black and white—need more books like Harvard Sitkoff’s moving account of the fierce “struggle for black equality” that consumed the nation from the late ’50s until the recent past. The opening chapter, “Up From Slavery” (recalling the title of …
in the autumn of 1935 President John L. Lewis of the Mine Workers, recognizing that the political climate had created a unique opportunity for the unionization of the mass-production industries—and despairing of persuading the AFL craft unions to relinquish their …
I: Welfare and Philanthropy A few years ago, the New York Times carried a long article on the decline of philanthropy and volunteer service in the more advanced welfare states of Western Europe. In such countries as Sweden, Denmark, and …
With the death of David Lewis in May 1981, democratic socialism in Canada lost one of its most dynamic leaders. In this volume of political memoirs Lewis records the intelligence and decency of a Russian-Jewish family that emigrated to Montreal …
Though blacks have felt they were under assault since July 4, 1776, they have also felt most of the time that progress, however slow and uneven, was inevitable. Next to Reconstruction, the period of greatest black optimism began with FDR’s …
On the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, the protests, demonstrations, and riots by Palestinians are intensifying. After the return of the Sinai, Israel’s refusal to consider relinquishing any more territory has helped stir a new wave of anti-Israeli …
Editors: The complicated, long struggle for democratization of the political and economic system in Yugoslavia is not made easier by one-sided, uninformed, and irresponsible articles like the one by Jeri Laber on “Human Rights in Yugoslavia” (Dissent, Spring 1982). One-sided …
On Fridays the tough cops take over on TV. Strike Force (10:00 P.M. Fridays, ABC), starring Robert Stack who used to battle the mob as Elliot Ness in The Untouchables, offers us a trio of sadistic rapist killers who cruise …
For some time now, the new world order that emerged after World War II has been profoundly shaken. America no longer is the unchallenged Number One. Yet that conviction seems to die hard in this country—just as the trend of …
