A merican culture thrives on contradictions. It exalts individualism yet is rife with the conformity so essential to consumerism. It preaches self-reliance and personal accountability (especially for poor people) while enriching pop psychologists who provide excuses for sins of the middle class. It nurtures feminism and encourages face-lifts. So we shouldn’t be entirely surprised by […]
Wendy Kaminer
Wendy Kaminer is a former senior correspondent for The American Prospect and a contributing editor at The Atlantic Monthly. She also serves on the national board of the American Civil Liberties Union.
A lawyer, social critic, and former Guggenheim Fellow, she writes about law, liberty, feminism, religion, and popular culture. Her latest book is Free for All: Defending Liberty in America Today. Other books she has written include Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety; True Love Waits: Essays and Criticism; It's All the Rage: Crime and Culture; I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions; and A Fearful Freedom: Women's Flight from Equality. Kaminer's articles and reviews have appeared in many other publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, and Newsweek, and her commentaries have aired on National Public Radio.
Before embarking on her writing career, Kaminer practiced law as a staff attorney in the New York Legal Aid Society and the New York City Mayor's Office.
Wendy Kaminer retains copyrights to all her articles.
Posted inFeatures
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 […]
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When Congress Plays Doctor
When HMOs deny life-saving care to their patients, members of Congress fulminate. Recently, 275 of them, including 29 Republicans, voted for a patients’ bill of rights. “Deny American citizens effective, life-saving treatments or palliatives for pain?” I imagine them saying indignantly to the HMOs. “That’s our job.” In the past few months, Congress and the […]
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Parochial Schools and the Court
Although it is frequently attacked as an elitist institution with no regard for the public will, the Supreme Court is hardly immune to cultural and political trends. Justices are, after all, appointed by presidents with particular ideological agendas, shaped partly by polls. Once they ascend to the bench, a few appointees may surprise and disappoint […]
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Caveat Lector
Remember the Beardstown Ladies? Their “common sense” investment guide became a best-seller in the mid-1990s. The story of these 16 small-town women who formed an investment club in the early 1980s and reportedly beat the market over a 10-year period titillated middle-class consumers eager to share in the bull market, while vindicating a mistrust of […]
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Toxic Media
L ike Claude Rains in Casablanca, Al Gore is shocked!, shocked! that the entertainment industry is marketing violent material to minors. Countering Hollywood’s macho entertainments with some macho rhetoric of his own, he gave the industry six months to “clean up its act” and declare a “ceasefire” in what he apparently sees as the media’s […]
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Absolutely Factious
Last month’s inaugural protesters, said by my sources to outnumbercelebrants, were mostly ignored by the mainstream press. The WeeklyStandard, however, did find time to make fun of them, noting that at one event–a teach-in on police brutality–the deceased victims of police were “represented in unflattering prom pictures.” You can imagine the outrage that editors at […]
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American Beauty
When I was in law school in the early 1970s and professors were struggling with the honorific “Ms.,” one of my male classmates used to chide me and several other women for “distracting” him with our presence. We were irritated, not flattered, by his flirtations–intent on being taken seriously as lawyers or, at least, as […]