Winter 2026

Growing up in the Bronx, I realized early on that this wasn’t a place for me. In the Bronx you witness many things you shouldn’t have to see. You have to be street smart and quick on your feet so …

The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement by Miriam Pawel Bloomsbury Press, 2009, 384 pp., $28 In 1978, just after I graduated from college, I worked at a migrant health clinic in …

The U.S. announcement that it would reopen direct contacts with Burma/Myanmar’s military government promises a welcome change from a failed policy of twenty years of isolation and sanctions. Burma/Myanmar has a singularly Manichean politics, as indicated by its dual name: …

I flew to post–Hurricane Katrina New Orleans on July 1, 2006, one week after my eighteenth birthday, where, except for a few weeks of visits home, I would live for the next eight months. I thought I was going to …

The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education by Diane Ravitch Basic Books, 2010, 288 pp., $26.95 It’s fall 2007. Diane Ravitch is packing a career’s worth of reading and writing …

On April 2, 2005, a month-and-a half after arriving in Iraq, I was in combat for the first time. We were pounded with mortars, rockets, grenades, vehicle-borne explosives, and small-arms fire for nearly two hours. After the fighting stopped, I …

The announcement by Barack Obama of the surge in U.S. troop deployment to Afghanistan—from a two-thousand-strong force in 2001 to one hundred thousand troops sometime this year—came bundled with a provision for a quick drawdown starting in July 2011. The …

To sit in your dorm room and believe you can change the world may be a certain kind of American collegiate tradition, akin to tailgating at Homecoming, taking Bob Marley seriously, and holding your roommate’s head over the toilet bowl …

I count myself among those disappointed in Barack Obama’s presidency so far. I had not expected miracles, but I had hoped for a more dramatic turnaround in our politics: for an end to the war in Afghanistan; a rapid closing …

Hello, America. I am the lowercase “g.” After the holidays, I am usually a happy sort. Congress returns from vacation, and my humble, seventh-place self is thrust back into the spotlight by the reintroduction into the national debate of words …

Richard Rorty, who died in 2007, was one of the leading American philosophers of the twentieth century. Rorty hailed from a family of leftists. His parents, James Rorty and Winifred Raushenbush, were disillusioned communists with avowed Trotskyist sympathies. His maternal …

The mantra of the current Israeli government that Jerusalem is “the eternal, undivided capital of the Jewish people” does nothing to resolve the stalemate over the city’s status. Nor does saying these words make Jerusalem truly undivided. The truth is …

Bad faith, indeed! George Packer’s opening sentences in the New York Times Magazine article he published as the Iraq invasion loomed read, “If you’re a liberal, why haven’t you joined the antiwar movement? More to the point, why is there …

After I’ve walked the dog, checked and rechecked that I have my lecture notes and student critiques ready for the 10:00 a.m. class I teach at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop, I sit at my desk with my second mug of …