Love in the Time of Privatization
“Social relationships mirror wage relationships in structure and tone, but without the explicit clarity of a wage relationship”: a review of Arlie Russell Hochschild’s The Outsourced Self.
Winter 2026
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Reader’s Détente: The Decline of the Digest
In a meeting between President Ronald Reagan and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, when the friends were both in high office, the president asked Mulroney, “Brian, did you read that article in the Reader’s Digest that trees cause pollution?”
The Horizontalists
By working outside structures of power one may circumvent coercive systems but not necessarily subvert them. Localizing politics—stripping it of its larger institutional ambitions—has its advantages, but without a larger structural vision, it does not go far enough.
Zionism and Its Discontents
Given the level of alarmed debate and self-criticism in at least some major sectors of the Israeli press, the tsunami of vitriol that has descended on Peter Beinart and his book is fascinating, puzzling, and profoundly depressing.
The Rise and Fall of the American Linguistic Empire
Lawrence Summers’s celebration of the global reach of English can only be read as an unabashed apology for American empire. By even the most strategically hard-headed criteria, however, cadres drawn from a monolingual American elite are a poor choice as ambassadors of U.S. interests.
Grad Students to the Barricades
If graduate students like myself do not want to come into work one day to find ourselves replaced by video lectures delivered by “information curators,” we will have to learn to take collective action.
The Corporatization of Higher Education
It is not just the economic climate in which our colleges and universities find themselves that determines what they charge and how they operate; it is their increasing corporatization.
From Master Plan to No Plan: The Slow Death of Public Higher Education
When Mitt Romney urges Americans to “get as much education as they can afford,” or when university administrators call the police as their first response to student protest, it’s Ronald Reagan’s playbook they’re working from.
Europe’s Perfect Storm: The Political and Economic Consequences of the Eurocrisis 
What exactly is the Eurocrisis a crisis of? Is it a currency crisis? A crisis of economic policy-making in Europe? Is it a crisis of a particular, expensive social model, as American conservatives like to claim? Or of the whole …
When Universities Go Abroad: NYU in Abu Dhabi
Scores of American universities have opened campuses abroad, New York University, where I teach, among them. (Others include Georgetown in Qatar, Yale in Singapore, Columbia in Jordan, and Duke in China.) Criticism and debate surround these developments, but have been …
Is America Ready for Democracy?
Is this country ready for democratic elections? That’s a question we often ask about countries emerging from despotic rule or civil war. But it’s a good general question; it invites political introspection and collective self-criticism. With regard to our own …
Citizenship and the Right to Birth Control
Calling this year’s political fight about funding for contraception a “war on women” may be a catchy slogan and a strong mobilizing call. But as an analysis, it is misleading. True, birth control does affect women disproportionately, because women still …
Can We All Get Along?
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt Pantheon, 2012, 419 pp. “This book,” writes Jonathan Haidt in his introduction to The Righteous Mind, “is about why it’s so hard for us to …
Introduction
If U.S. higher education is in crisis, as a spate of recent books and articles would have it, then it’s a strange crisis. Outside the anti-intellectual Right, and even inside it when its writers forget themselves, we hear that advanced …
Big Dollar, Little Democracy
Republic Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It by Lawrence Lessig Twelve, 2011, 381 pp. Money talks. It is also a conversation stopper. Almost any discussion among progressives of what is really needed to solve the nation’s …
