A decade ago, in year nine of the Reagan-Bush era, Paul Starr, Robert Reich and I founded a new liberal journal. The Prospect began as a quarterly, with 2,700 subscribers. Longtime readers may notice a few changes in this, our forty-seventh issue, the first to be published biweekly. 1989 was not a liberal moment. The […]
Books, Arts and Culture
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Rising Tide?
“They almost have a nostalgic quality about them, sort of like the bell bottoms stuck in the back of the closet,” writes Jeffrey M. Berry of today’s quixotic and starry-eyed liberals. “But liberalism is not dead. Indeed, it’s thriving.” In The New Liberalism: The Rising Power of Citizen Groups, Berry marshals copious evidence that over […]
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Naked in the Valley
Po Bronson’s The Nudist on the Late Shift and Other True Tales of Silicon Valley 12.02.99 | reviewed by Nicholas Confessore ‘Tis the season for mainstream magazines-Time, Newsweek, BusinessWeek-to finally run cover stories on that newest of old trends, e-commerce. Skip them. You are unlikely to find a more vivid or readable tour of Silicon […]
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The Money Artist
Lawrence Weschler’s Boggs: A Comedy Of Values 12.02.99 | reviewed by James K. Galbraith Modern economists make bad historians, as a rule. The problem is that a simple-minded metaphor-supply and demand-with its deep yet subtle political commitment to laissez-faire, controls their thought. The market is supposed to rule. Therefore it does. Whatever happened, the market […]
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Workers United
Robert Bruno’s Steelworker Alley: How Class Works in Youngstown 12.02.99 | reviewed by Lisa Burrell Black spots on his father’s lungs convinced Robert Bruno it was time to reconnect with his family and his working-class roots. The result of his journey home is Steelworker Alley: How Class Works in Youngstown, a well- researched argument that […]
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Rank Class
Nicholas Lemann’s The Big Test 12.02.99 | reviewed by Peter Schrag The late Albert Shanker, longtime president of the American Federation of Teachers, sometimes made the facetious suggestion that if children were all awarded college diplomas at birth, knowledge would be pursued for its own sake and a great many of the problems of American […]
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Hoop Schemes?
A White House congratulatory ceremony for a championship sports team is usually just a big, friendly photo opportunity, filled with the platitudes and gift exchanges typical of such an apolitical celebration. But in 1991, when the National Basketball Association (NBA) champion Chicago Bulls paid a visit to George Bush, Craig Hodges, then a backup guard […]
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Sex, Lies, and The Scarlet Letter
O nce when I was about nine, I wandered into my aunt’s kitchen during Thanksgiving to find all the grown-up women whispering, hugging, and crying. When they explained to me what was going on (Auntie Cookie had just found out she was going to have another baby and they were crying from happiness), they confirmed […]
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Perrier in the Newsroom
There was a day not far distant, you know, just before World War II, when nearly all of us news people, although perhaps white collar by profession, earned blue-collar salaries. We were part of the “common people.” We suffered the same budgetary restraints, the same bureaucratic indignities, waited in the same lines, suffered the same […]
