Winter 2026

My father moved out the summer before I began middle school, just before I turned twelve. The first months of separation were marked by his efforts to reach out to my two sisters and me. He came to all our …

I am the seventeenth or eighteenth, possibly even the nineteenth, child of my father. But who’s counting? Certainly, he’s not. I don’t know much about his relationships with all his children—in fact, I don’t even know all my siblings—so I …

“THE YOUNG are honorable and see the problems,” Paul Goodman wrote in 1968, “but they don’t know anything because we have not taught them anything.” Michael Brown’s wise and eloquent essay proves him wrong. The young know quite a lot, …

Adding a bit of jest to Hegel, Marx quipped that if history repeats itself, it does so first as tragedy then as farce. Even by this standard, it is not clear how we should characterize Pakistan’s third overthrow of military …

Since 2004, the sixty-two-foot statue of Jesus erected by the Solid Rock Church has stood as one of the most conspicuous landmarks in southern Ohio, located at the midpoint of the fifty-mile corridor of suburban sprawl along I-75 between Cincinnati …

Two and a half years after the recession started, Wall Street executives are once again collecting billions in bonuses, businesses are flush with cash, but most of America is still hurting. After a growth spurt at the end of last …

You lose an election with your second worst performance ever, and 20,000 people join the party in the aftermath. Then the leadership contenders—all but one prominent ministers in the last government—compete with each other to distance themselves from that government’s …

BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University Louis Menand W.W. Norton, 2010 Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities Martha C. Nussbaum Princeton University Press, 2010 IN 1922, Austrian art …

We hear a lot today about federalism, the doctrine that emphasizes the rights and powers of the states versus those of the federal government. The political Right expresses alarm at the dramatic expansion in central government power that began under …

When I tell people that I live in my hometown of Rochester, N.Y., their most common response is, “Why?” Rochester is the fifty-first largest metro region in the United States, a tad smaller than Buffalo and a tad bigger than …

Abraham Lincoln: A Life by Michael Burlingame Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008, Volume 1, 942 pp., Volume 2, 1,034 pp. IN 1936, the great Lincoln historian J.G. Randall provocatively asked, “Has the Lincoln theme been exhausted?” At a moment when …

A Home Elsewhere: Reading African American Classics in the Age of Obama by Robert B. Stepto Harvard University Press, 2010, 179 pp., $22.95 THE NOMINATION, election, and inauguration of Barack Obama signified a multiplicity of things to a multitude of …

Nothing feeds jolly bankers and dyspeptic pundits more than a tasty crisis, and this year’s turmoil over the Euro has provided an especially rich diet to critics of state-owned enterprises and public sector social programs. “What we’re seeing in Greece …