Features

PRO by Garance Franke-Ruta “Hillary Clinton is too ambitious to be our first female president,” an editorial in The Onion joked last year. “What’s more, nobody asked her to run. … Shouldn’t the first woman to break the gender barrier of the American presidency be the type of woman who listens to those who […]

In April 2004, AFL-CIO president John Sweeney grew concerned that John Kerry was getting too much of his economic advice from the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party. Kerry had just completed his primary sweep. In the general election, he would need the unions. Sweeney proposed a private meeting to discuss living standards as […]

Since January 10, when President Bush proposed a “troop surge” in Iraq, the administration has responded to legislative critics by stating that Congress cannot handle the responsibility of conducting an effective war. “You can’t run a war by committee,” Vice President Richard Cheney told FOX News on January 14. But Democrats are no longer willing […]

The artist was spread-eagled against the wall. Dinh Q. Le had been putting up an enormous piece of artwork in the Ho Chi Minh City Fine Arts Museum when he realized that he was missing his level, one of only two available for the installation of Saigon Open City (SOC), Vietnam’s first international art show […]

America has been operating with the wrong paradigm for China. Day after day, U.S. officials carry out policies based upon premises about China’s future that are at best questionable and at worst downright false. The mistake lies in the very assumption that political change — and with it, eventually, democracy — is coming to China, […]

Development projects anywhere in the world often have a high human cost. In Colombia, the price is often measured in human lives and blood. Esperanza (she would risk her life, she says, if her real name appeared in print) saw her neighbors pay that price in 2001. Her house sits on the bank of the […]

One swallow does not a summer make nor one election a new era. But some significant new realities that emerged from 2006 merit attention. First, clearly, this was a sweeping victory. Democrats had to overcome the Republican advantages in incumbency, gerrymandered districts, money, and mobilization, and to do so in the midst of a wartime […]

If the states, as Louis Brandeis put it, are the laboratories of democracy, then its only fitting that the 2006 election, which ushered in a host of eager new experimenters, fell just a week before Brandeis 150th birthday. For the first time since 1994, Democrats now control a majority of governorships in the country — […]

Five days into Israel’s war with Hezbollah, I visited the Umm El-Fahm Gallery in the town whose name it bore. Umm El-Fahm, the largest Muslim community in Israel, with a population of 43,000, anchors the largely Arab Triangle area on the coastal plain just south of Haifa. Outside the gallery, Israeli planes were bombing Lebanon […]

Ira Glasser is a fighter. He’s been defending freedom of speech, the right to privacy, and the right to due process for more than 30 years through his work with the American Civil Liberties Union, including 23 years as the head of the organization. Of late, he sounds just as combative when he talks about […]