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.”
I used to describe my busy schedule at the “best writing job in America.” But in the hectic pace of my life in those days, I now see myself avoiding my growing sense of dread and desperation. It wasn’t until years later that the scales began to fall from my eyes, allowing me to appraise my work life with honesty and to see myself for what I was: just another working person whose dreams of a decent future had slowly faded before the harsh realities of below-inflation raises and relentlessly rising health care costs.
It was an ad on a subway train that first gave me the idea to become a teacher. In March of 2003, my senior year of college, I was riding along listening to my MP3 player when I looked up and saw an advertisement for New York City Teaching Fellows—a black background with stark white lettering: “How many lives did your last spreadsheet change?” The job seemed like a challenge, and that was what I was looking for.
Contingent faculty constitute an academic proletariat, where a lack of workplace control, negligible job security, and prevailing low wages define the conditions of employment. In response to these conditions, previously solitary academic laborers are joining together in an attempt to speak with a collective voice.
The initial promise was that Massively Open Online Courses would function as a free educational commons, along the lines of other free internet resources. The new MOOC strategy, however, involves rich universities being paid by poor ones.
Berkeley politics flesh out uncertainties if not downright disagreements on the left over “growth,” environmentalism, U.S. manufacturing, homelessness, and public employee compensation. To grasp the political realities of today’s Berkeley is not only to dispel an antiquated myth about an iconic place; it’s also to begin to grapple with major incoherence in progressivism at large.
“Is there such a thing as the left and right? What distinguishes them, not just in our time but across time?” Bruce Robbins and James Livingston argue with Corey Robin and Michael Kazin about their recent attempts to theorize the political spectrum.
