In 1913, the Armory Show gave thousands of Americans their first glimpse of modern European painting. Now, in an exhibit entitled The Armory Show at 100: Modernism and Revolution, the New York Historical Society has made it possible for us to see what all the excitement was about.
As the still-unfolding revelations of NSA surveillance over virtually all of Americans’ telecommunications show, it is clear that privacy advocates have their work cut out for them. Two recent books decry the privacy violations but stop short of formulating workable ways to protect privacy interests.
Violence against gays and lesbians in Russia has never been as intense as it is today. The more politicians discuss implementing anti-gay laws, the more attacks occurred against sexual minorities. And Russia’s LGBT community is too weak to withstand this aggression.
Yossi Klein Halevi’s Like Dreamers tells the story of the members of the 55th Paratrooper Reserve Brigade, who played in securing Jerusalem during the Six Day War. From the peace movement to the settlements, the paths followed by the brigade’s veterans was a microcosm of Israel’s most intense schisms.
Evgeny Morozov and Jaron Lanier, themselves lapsed true believers in the Internet gospel, warn that the widespread and quasi-messianic enthusiasm for the Internet underwrites a technocratic agenda inimical to the survival of democracy. But their critiques never fully grapple with larger political and economic questions.
Technological innovation has been key to American military policy since 9/11, but it has by no means been the only driver of change. We might better view these years as a story of the U.S. national security apparatus gradually breaking free of the restraints imposed on it in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate. It is also a story of the military and intelligence wings of this apparatus becoming increasingly intertwined and indistinguishable from one another.
As new scholarship has challenged the standard view of postwar American history, the need for a new narrative has become obvious. Joshua Freeman’s recent survey of the nation since 1945 is comprehensive in scope, but fails to develop a new way of understanding the recent past.
The Affordable Care Act is better than nothing and it has already had a real impact. But it is a timid law that will likely show timid results in the long run. Real health care reform will require lawmakers to confront the problems that the ACA studiously avoided.
In September Poland went on strike. In many countries struck by economic hardships and severe austerity measures, a mass strike would be no news at all. But in a country where media relentlessly reiterate the dogma that the general public is “passive” and there are no unions “worth reasoning with,” this is news indeed. It also raises questions about the relationship between today’s protests and the original Solidarity movement.
The debate over the working conditions for adjunct faculty was recently reignited by the death of Margaret Mary Vojtko, a longtime adjunct professor at Duquesne University who was fired in the last year of her life and died penniless. Moshe Marvit talks to Dan Kovalik, a labor lawyer who knew Votjko and has helped to publicize her story.
Mexican leftists have flocked to support teachers’ unions in their protests against proposed education reforms. But by overlooking the unions’ undemocratic features and lack of popular support, the left weakens the fight against neoliberalism.
Over the last decade, as many as 100,000 Mexicans have been killed in drug-related violence. The fighting is sustained by consumer demand for drugs and guns from the United States, but for most Americans the contours of the conflict remain obscure. A leading Mexican investigative journalist talks about her newly-translated book, Narcoland.
Despite Bulgaria’s ascension to the EU in 2007, organized crime has continued unabated and no panacea from Brussels has materialized. The corruption has driven Bulgarians into the streets for the first time since the fall of Communism.
We often consider Le Corbusier’s top-down redevelopment ethos a dead letter from the urban renewal era, a victim of its own mistakes. But neoliberal governance, as in Bloomberg’s New York, has seen the revival of large scale architectural schemes and the return of the all-powerful planner archetype.
“This generation has shown itself and to some extent empowered itself through the Gezi Park protests; the question is whether it can transform itself into some form of organized presence in representative democratic institutions. Democracy thrives on the interplay of formal representative institutions and the energies of civil society and the voices and noise of the streets.”
