Scholars of Weimar Germany have long wrestled with the fact that this period of unparalleled innovation in intellectual and cultural life was a time of economic and social crisis, brought to a close ...
Tag: Social Movements
A Letter to My Children about the Supreme Court’s Ruling on Marriage Equality
Many parents struggle with how to talk to their kids about marriage equality. In what follows, a former Supreme Court law clerk, top appellate litigator ...
Those Refugees
While most Americans were looking forward to this past Independence Day, an ugly scene was unfolding in Murrieta, California. Patriotic citizens, armed with placards that read “America has been ...
Toxic Literature
When all that is solid melts into air, the plot thickens. Darragh McKeon’s debut novel, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, and Heather Houser’s first monograph of literary criticism, Ecosickness in ...
Race and Campus Rape: Equal Under the Law?
It took me five years to muster the strength to report my rape. It was still within the (five-year) limitation period, and I told my story to a Philadelphia prosecutor armed only with the evidence of ...
The People’s Climate March: Faces and Signs
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Last Sunday, September 21, New York City hosted the largest march against climate change ...
Was That All There Was to the Left?
In the wake of Pete Seeger’s death in January, eulogies, memorials, and obituaries routinely mentioned his youthful communist affiliation. The famous folk singer had, like many of his contemporaries ...
Gandhi in Africa
The title of this biography, Gandhi Before India, glances backwards and forwards. It invokes Ramachandra Guha’s previous blockbuster India After Gandhi and suggests a likely title—Gandhi After ...
Latin America’s Left: Between Demos and Kratos
On March 5, 2013, the Venezuelan government announced the death of president Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías. In the New York Review of Books, Alma Guillermoprieto, one of the most perceptive commentators ...
Hari Kunzru on Networks, the Novel, and the Politics of the Author
Hari Kunzru is a British-born writer who lives and works in New York. He is the author of four novels as well as numerous articles in publications including Wired, the New Yorker, the Washington ...
Animal Feelings
We read stories of how, after losing their companions, dogs and bunnies refuse to eat; ducks and horses exhibit nervousness and social anxiety; dolphins strand themselves ...
Politics: In the Halls of Powerand Out of Doors
Historical scholarship about the United States has been transformed in the past forty years. The new history, partly prompted by the politics of the 1960s, dismissed earlier ones that, in important ...
Counterpower’s Long Game
“This is the Beginning of the Beginning” flashed in white light on Manhattan’s Verizon Building. The message seemed to jump out of nowhere and Occupy Wall Street marchers crossing the Brooklyn Bridge ...
How Did The Neoliberals Pull It Off?
The first thing I did was make a mistake. I thought I had understood capitalism, but what I had done was assume an attitude—melancholy sadness—towards it. This attitude is not correct. —Donald ...