Refusing Marcuse: 50 Years After One-Dimensional Man
In the decades following the New Left’s collapse, has the stature of any intellectual fallen more dramatically than that of Herbert Marcuse?
Fall 2025
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Passports for Sale
Until recently, becoming a citizen of a country has largely been regarded as priceless—a rare intangible privilege that can’t be bought or sold. This perception is starting to fade.
Segregation’s Long Shadow
What is remarkable in Ferguson is not just the way segregation has been sustained, but the way it maps so cleanly onto patterns of economic disadvantage.
Subsidizing Inequality: New York City’s Crooked Development Agenda
For far too long, New York City development projects have heavily subsidized corporations and big banks at the expense of small businesses and low-wage workers. Will Bill de Blasio do anything to change that?
What This Month’s Jobs Report Doesn’t Tell Us
This month’s jobs report was widely celebrated for showing that—after adding 217,000 jobs in May 2014—the United States had finally returned to the December 2007 (pre-recession) level of employment. This is a useful comparative benchmark, underscoring the unusual depth and …
The Wage Crunch in Perspective
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century merits ongoing praise for the renewed attention it has drawn to the challenge of American inequality. The decade of collaborative and comparative work on the trajectory of top incomes that it represents, as …
Our Parks Are Not for Sale: From the Gold Coast of New York to the Venice Biennale
Many municipal parks agencies have become charity cases, overly dependent upon support from conservancies and “Friends” groups in order to fulfill their missions. Some of the most glaring inequities in the United States are becoming manifest in the way our public spaces are designed, maintained, and regulated.
Mexico’s Youth Protest a Return to the Past 
Every six years, Mexico goes through an extended period of political paroxysm called presidential elections. Campaigns hijack the routines of normal public life, the media are monothematic, political propaganda litters the streets of large cities and remote villages. In a …
The Plutocratic Imagination
Books discussed in this essay: A Visit From the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan, Knopf, 2010, 288 pp. A Hologram for the King, by Dave Eggers, McSweeney’s, 2012, 328 pp. Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris, Little, …
A Charter for the 99 Percent
After November 6, 2012, the big sound rippling around the world was not a chorus of bipartisanship, not a whoop of euphoria, but a collective sigh of relief. Still, it must not be forgotten that nearly half of America’s voters …
Social Policy and Poverty: Don’t Fear Europe!
My own education in American social policy began intensively in 1980. That year, three events cemented my interest in American poverty and the U.S. public response to it.
Is America Ready for Democracy?
Is this country ready for democratic elections? That’s a question we often ask about countries emerging from despotic rule or civil war. But it’s a good general question; it invites political introspection and collective self-criticism. With regard to our own …
Big Dollar, Little Democracy
Republic Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It by Lawrence Lessig Twelve, 2011, 381 pp. Money talks. It is also a conversation stopper. Almost any discussion among progressives of what is really needed to solve the nation’s …
Prosperity and Politics
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson Crown Publishers, 2012, 529 pp. MIT economist Daron Acemoglu and Harvard political scientist and economist James A. Robinson have written a book, Why …
The Politics of TED
TED’s dominant political idea is the denial of politics—a refusal to acknowledge any real power struggle in public life.
