Features

Self-invention has always been an American ideal. We’re supposed to enjoy opportunities to make our own fortunes and control our own fates, in this world and the next. The Calvinism of seventeenthcentury colonials proved less quintessentially American than did the notion that you can choose to be born again in Christ. This is not a […]

Some of the most widely discussed and controversial proposals for reforming American schools focus on the twin themes of giving local schools more operational autonomy and forcing them to compete for students. Proponents of charter schools and voucher plans argue that schools must be liberated from the controlling hands of educational bureaucrats. If such operational […]

The frenzy surrounding Dave Eggers and his debut memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, reached a certain kind of climax in late April. Eggers had already been beatified by critics, his book lovingly reviewed as a major breakthrough, and the journal he currently edits, McSweeney‘s, enshrined as a must-read, when The New York Times‘s […]

When Wendy Wasserstein’s play An American Daughter premiered in 1997, critics deemed it superficial, suggesting that Wasserstein had failed to do justice to the multitude of political issues she had raised. The criticism also holds true for the film version of An American Daughter, which was adapted by Wasserstein herself, and which airs this month […]

On multiple video monitors at his Manhattan apartment in the Hotel Elsinore, the modern Hamlet (Ethan Hawke) mesmerizes himself with his own distressed image. At Blockbuster Video, he rents action films by the dozen, all the better to create his frightening movie-within-a-movie that is his version of the play wherein he’ll “catch the conscience of […]

Washington, D.C. I n the last year, Greenpeace and Citizen Action, two important national left-of-center organizations, have fallen on hard times. This summer, Greenpeace USA closed down all of its field offices, eliminated its canvassing operation, and slashed its staff from 400 to 65. Several of Citizen Action’s state affiliates have either disbanded or severed […]

Works Discussed in this Essay: Celebration, U.S.A.: Living in Disney’s Brave New Town, by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins. Holt, 342 pages, $25.00. The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Values in Disney’s New Town, by Andrew Ross. Ballantine, 340 pages, $25.95. Home Town, by Tracy Kidder. Random House, 349 pages, $25.95. […]

In The New York Times Magazine for November 28, Jacob Weisberg wrote about “The Rehabilitation of Joe McCarthy.” The article partly drew on (and credited) Joshua Marshall’s earlier American Prospect article “Exhuming McCarthy” [March/April 1999]. Weisberg depicted the endless rehashing of who was right about communism as a kind of family co-dependency among leftists and […]

Some Democrats may have lost faith that they’ll be electing another president in the year 2000. But a host of evangelical novelists seem to think a liberal president in the new millennium is a near certainty. They just expect his stay in office will be a short one. And his downfall won’t come by scandal, […]

Works Discussed in this Essay: Spinning Wheels: The Politics of Urban School Reform, by Frederick M. Hess. Brookings Institution Press, 228 pages, $16.95. The Tracking Wars: State Reform Meets School Policy, by Tom Loveless. Brookings Institution Press, 194 pages, $16.95. The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving beyond Traditional Classrooms and “Tougher […]