Features

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

More than two-thirds of Americans call themselves environmentalists. Their rank includes every serious presidential candidate, a growing list of corporate executives, some of the country’s most extreme radicals, and ordinary people from just about every region, class, and ethnic group. Even allowing for some hypocrisy, finding consensus so tightly overlaid on division is reason for […]

Christian Parenti’s Lockdown America: Police and Prisons In The Age of Crisis 01.03.00 | reviewed by J. W. Mason Over the past 20 years, the United States has carried out an experiment in punitive policing that has no precedent in a democracy. The prison population has increased fourfold, to nearly two million. Though these figures […]

Works discussed in this essay: Reading Mixed Signals: Ambivalence in American Public Opinion about Government, by Albert H. Cantril and Susan Davis Cantril. Woodrow Wilson Center Press (distributed by the Johns Hopkins University Press), 253 pages. “Retro-Politics: The Political Typology, Version 3.0,” report by the Pew Research Center for The People & The Press, 163 […]

Rod Smolla’s Deliberate Intent: A Lawyer Tells the True Story of Murder by the Book 01.03.00 | reviewed by Franklyn S. Haiman Rod Smolla, a professor of law at the University of Richmond, is one of the country’s most able and articulate First Amendment experts. In this engrossing narrative, he explains how and why- contrary […]