A book by two political theorists argues that new, cultural definitions of race can be as insidious as the old, biological ones.
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State of the Debate: The Other American Dilemma
Anthony Lukas’s last book is a powerful tale of what used to be “class warfare” in America — and a lesson about why so many people have had a hard time telling that story.
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Below the Beltway: The Irresponsible Elites
Washington, D.C., March 5, 1998 A s I write, the Monica Lewinsky affair-or perhaps episode is a better term-is far from resolved, but it is possible to draw certain conclusions about the role of the press. The most important is that the barrier separating the elite media from the print and television tabloids-the Washington Post […]
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State of the Debate: The Rise and Fall of Racialized Liberalism
Liberalism took a fateful turn in the 1960s by redefining reform in racial terms. Two new books on urban politics sometimes overstate their case against recent liberal policies, but they help clarify what went wrong.
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Connecting with E.M. Forster
A futuristic fantasy from early in this century offers us a hellish version of life on the Internet.
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The Other Edmund Wilson
Today there is no shortage of writing about literature or of literature about writing. But there used to be writing that was about both.
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The Shaming Sham
Conservatives, and even a few liberals, insist that moral shaming isn’t as bad as government censorship. Don’t believe them, warns a conservative writer.
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Storylines: Scandals for Dummies
O n the first Sunday in March, the Washington Post published an investigative piece highlighting Vice President Al Gore’s central role in the Democratic Party fundraising operation. The article, by Bob Woodward, chronicled how Gore called donors one by one, hitting them up for money in a manner so direct even one veteran fundraiser called […]
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State of the Debate: The Chicago Acid Bath
A skeptical inquiry into the work of Richard Epstein and Richard Posner.
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Essay: Age of Irony
Taking irony seriously may seem like missing the point. Today’s ironic sensibility is never serious. But the old masters of irony had serious fun cutting through cant and pretension.