In 1960, Paul Goodman—social thinker, activist, poet, and novelist—published his groundbreaking book Growing Up Absurd. An examination of youth disaffection in our affluent but spiritually empty society, Goodman’s work inspired and galvanized a burgeoning generation of sixties students and intellectuals. …
“OUR PUBLIC officials are not much concerned about the ‘waste of human resources’…. But … the big causes of stupidity, of lack of initiative and lack of honorable incentive, are glaring,” noted Paul Goodman—a half-century ago—in Growing Up Absurd. “Our …
I’m still puzzled fifty years later by what it was about the climate and the culture in 1960 that encouraged many young people to think they could make the world over. That was the year when little groups of black …
On June 21, residents of Fremont, a small meatpacking town just outside Omaha, Nebraska, voted by 57 percent to deny work and shelter to undocumented immigrants. Why Fremont, Nebraska, and why now? Some observers, not knowing the Fremont measure was …
In general, I’m not a big fan of leaders in Latin America eliminating or loosening term limits so that they can stay in office longer. I also believe that recent processes of constitutional reform in many Latin American countries have …
More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City by William Julius Wilson W.W. Norton, 2009, 190 pp., $24.95 The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today by Andrew J. Cherlin Knopf, 2009, …
Hitch 22: A Memoir by Christopher Hitchens Twelve/Hachette Book Group, 2010 448 pp., $26.99 HAS THERE ever been anyone quite like Christopher Hitchens? As a writer and a thinker, Hitchens may be the greatest performance artist the profession has ever …
“DON’T FORGET your cape,” my brother gibed on the phone. “Will the workshops be at night?” a colleague chortled. “Is this like a Star Trek convention?” asked a bewildered friend as I prepared to leave for the biannual conference devoted …
Minnesota was long known as a progressive stronghold, from its support for Ignatius Donnelly and the Populists of the 1890s and A.C. Townley and his Nonpartisan League in the First World War era to its election of Farmer-Labor governors, senators, …
When I became director of the undergraduate Urban Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania in 1983, I was surprised to find that it lacked a multidisciplinary course that aimed to provide a coherent interpretation of contemporary urban America. What …
An old conservative-minded contention goes something like this: if you start with an egalitarian ethos, you will bottom out at complete leveling. It’s a slippery slope to the end of individuality. This was not simply a social or economic claim. …
Danny Rubinstein’s account, in his Summer 2010 Dissent article (“One State/Two States: Rethinking Israel and Palestine”), of the disdainful reaction of Sufyan Abu-Zayda, a prominent figure in the Palestinian Authority, to Benjamin Netanyahu’s “Bar-Ilan speech,” in which the right-wing prime …
The Privileges by Jonathan Dee Random House, 2010, 272 pp., $25 AFTER THE fall of 2008, when the American economy revealed itself to have been a particularly elaborate house of cards, after the astonishment and the rage and the losses …
In the not-so-distant past, when Norberto Bobbio, the Italian political theorist, first asked this question, it was (or so it looks today) relatively easy to answer. There were only two choices: the version of socialism that prevailed in what we …
A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo 1977, 346 pp. Bombingham by Anthony Grooms 2001, 320 pp. Dispatches by Michael Herr 1968, 260 pp. Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson 2007, 702 pp. War Story Jim Morris 1979, 342 pp. …
