The Invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo Sand, trans Yael Lotan Verso, 2009, 332 pp., $34.95 Everyone has heard of Attila and his Huns, who fought their way on pony back from the northern borders of China to the …
Michelle Rhee, the school chancellor of the District of Columbia Public School System (DCPS), is standing behind me in the ladies room of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. I start to sweat. I feel as if I’m standing …
Progressives have wailed against “market fundamentalism for the last quarter-century. They complain that conservatives want to eliminate the government and leave everything to the market. This is nonsense. The Right has every bit as much interest in government involvement in …
Come to Perth next year and give us a keynote address. That was the gist of an e-mail I got one July day in 2008 from the Australian Society for the Study of Labor History. At the time, both the …
Sixty years ago, in The New Men of Power, C. Wright Mills made a perceptive observation about the troubled relationship between labor leaders and radical intellectuals during an era of cold war militarism and conservative advance. Wrote Mills: To have …
Let’s not make this easy. Early in the morning of March 3, 1992, after a long discussion of their racial resentments, John Ayers and Sean Riley set out from their suburban neighborhood of Silver Spring, Maryland, looking for black people …
The United States has been fighting the war in Afghanistan for more than eight years. That’s longer than U.S. participation in the Second World War or the Iraq War. By the end of 2010, it will have surpassed the length …
Keynes: The Return of the Master by Robert Skidelsky Public Affairs, 2009, 256 pp., $25.95 Keynes: The Rise, Fall, and Return of the 20th Century’s Most Influential Economist by Peter Clarke Bloomsbury, 2009, 211 pp., $20 A fierce debate raged …
It has been more than a year since I sat with my older brother at my father’s side, watching him slowly succumb to pancreatic cancer. At the age of seventy-two, James Bevel had seen and experienced more than most men. …
Richard Nixon showed that there really are second (and third) acts in American life, but Congress didn’t get the memo, and so Jean Montrevil may be denied his own American Dream. A Haitian citizen who came to the United States …
I doubt there is a “should” here anywhere. How one responds to the first query will turn, in part, on whom one places within the category “American intellectuals.” For the sake of this discussion, let’s assume that those who make …
There may have been a day when American intellectuals had the luxury of thumbing their noses at pop culture: magazines and journals devoted to serious reflection enjoyed healthy circulations; weighty thinkers won notice for their big ideas rather than their …
In the summer of 2008, I went to work as a volunteer for the Obama campaign in my hometown of Gainesville, Georgia. To my and everyone’s surprise, the campaign had hired a field organizer for Gainesville, a nineteen-year-old Jewish student …
There is a small fortune to be made writing about the young. Neil Howe and the late William Strauss showed that in 1991 with their bestselling Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069, and since then, Howe and …
Finally, the atrocity of gendercide—the murder and mutilation of victims selected by sex—is getting prominent attention in the press. Through feminist online activism, but more prominently through the efforts of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof (in his new book …
