The Strange Case of Hany K
On October 26, some two dozen reporters crammed into a conference room on the 18th floor of a concrete high-rise in downtown Newark to await the arrival of Hany Kiareldeen, a 31-year-old Palestinian man who, shortly before midnight on the previous day, had been released from the nearby Hudson County jail. An immigrant’s release from…
Comment: The End of Citizenship?
For all of the carnival aspect of the Seattle protests, something very important has been stimulated by the World Trade Organization (WTO) sessions. For the first time, a coherent opposition program has begun to challenge the dominant consensus about global trade. For more than a century, the world’s ordinary citizens and their elected leaders have…
On Thinking Bigger
I’m not offended by liberals who call for “incrementalism”doing a little bit now, seeing how it goes, hoping they can do a little more later. Small steps are sometimes prudent. If things go well, they help build the case for something larger. But it’s important to remember that incrementalism is a tactic, not a vision.…
Ian Shapiro’s Democratic Justice
When all the law-abiding adult members of a society share free and equal citizenship in a fair scheme of social cooperation, they constitute a democracy. This is the ideal of democratic justice that is captured by John Rawls, the most eminent twentieth-century Anglo-American political philosopher. A society does not necessarily achieve justice merely by following…
Indefensible
This fall, Bill Clinton threatened to veto tax cuts, an abortion ban, environmental riders, cuts in foreign aid, education funding directed at the states rather than directly at schools, and reductions in a community policing measure. But when the $288.8 billion defense appropriations billrepresenting the largest increase in military spending since the first Reagan budget…
China: The Engaging Question
Works Discussed in this Essay: The Paradox of China’s Post-Mao Reforms, edited by Merle Goldman and Roderick MacFarquhar. Harvard University Press, 424 pages, $49.50. After the Propaganda State: Media, Politics and “Thought Work” in Reformed China, by Daniel C. Lynch. Stanford University Press, 424 pages, $49.50. About Face: A History of America’s…
What You Need to Beat Goliath
In Michael Mann’s gripping new movie The Insider, the two central characters uphold the truth through acts of corporate disobediencethe moral equivalent of civil disobedience in an age when the threat to freedom so often comes from corporate rather than state power. Fired as head of research at cigarette-maker Brown & Williamson, Jeffrey Wigand (Russell…
High-Tech Migrant Labor
Guest workers: They’re not just picking vegetables anymore. A new class of “migrant workers” is taking shape in America’s Silicon Valley and other technology centers. These immigrants are not sneaking over U.S. bordersthey arrive by jet from India, the Philippines, China, and Taiwan to take jobs in computer programming, software design, and information services. And…
The War on High Schools
High school gave me my first lessons in bureaucracy: Rules were meant to be rigidly applied, not questioned; power was meant to be abused by petty functionaries. I don’t mean to malign the entire faculty of my school. It included some very good teachers who encouraged curiosity and provocation and never lost their sense of…
Happy with Health Care?
The American Association of Health Plans (AAHP)the main HMO trade associationhas a novel strategy for persuading Congress not to take patients’ rights seriously. Rather than arguing with polling data that shows broad public support for tough HMO regulation, they point to other polling data showing that Americans are basically satisfied with managed care plans. Therefore,…
The New Culture of Rural America
During the Roaring Twenties, President Calvin Coolidge had himself photographed in a Vermont hayfield, a fresh pair of overalls covering his dress shirt, his black shoes still gleaming from their morning shine. Despite the incongruity, no one laughed. In 1994, after the Republican take-over of Congress, Bill Clinton’s pollsters devised the model American vacation for…
The Green Card Solution
Who harvested the fruits, vegetables, and nuts that graced our Thanksgiving tables? Most Americans, taking a moment to think, would know that immigrant labor in American fields brought in this autumn’s crop. The circumstances of these workers’ lives, however, are less well-known. The stark reality is that more than half of all farm workers live…
Breaking the Newsroom
In the making of modern southern California in the mid-decades of the century, the Chandler family’s Los Angeles Times called the shots. It made and unmade congressmen, senators, governors; it set a good deal of their policy agendas; it put Richard Nixon into the political big time. It professionalized itself, evolving from publisher’s power tool…
Ad Creep
It is quite rare to find ad criticism anywhere near the medium of television, except in such criticism’s natural habitat, the suburban basement TV room, where stoned teenagers have deconstructed Coke campaigns for generations. Sure, Dick Clark includes zany outtakes from commercials on his TV Bloopers and Practical Jokes shows, ABC’s Best Commercials You’ve Never…
Martyrs and Movies
On New Year’s Eve 1993, in the dead-end town of Falls City, Nebraska, two men shot and stabbed Teena Brandon, a 21-year-old who, in defiance of the laws of biology, wanted desperately to live her life as a man. On October 6, 1998, two men smashed the head of Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay man,…
Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just
Every age has its ways of despising art-which also are ways of taking it seriously, for you don’t smash idols you don’t fear. Art can be despised with thumbscrews, bonfires, or money. It can be smothered in Glad Wrap: feel-good art meant to lie about how happy the proletariat is, say, or how cute the…
Wild Pitch
For baseball players and fans, winter is the “off-season.” But for team owners and their executives, it is the season for deal making. As most fans are looking back on another season of what might have been (except for New York Yankee fans, who get to savor another World Series victory), the deal makers are…
