Books and Ideas

The Plot Against Equality The Plot Against Equality

Walter Benn Michaels's The Trouble With Diversity challenges us to remove our race-tinted glasses and view the world in the class-based terms that, he argues, define it.

Dec 7, 2006 / Books & the Arts / Robert S. Boynton

On the Iraq Memo Donald Rumsfeld Wrote as He Was About to Be Fired On the Iraq Memo Donald Rumsfeld Wrote as He Was About to Be Fired

Goodness, gracious! He was right all along.

Dec 7, 2006 / Column / Calvin Trillin

Justice Brandeis Justice Brandeis

One of the phrases most often quoted from Justice Brandeis is, "If we would guide by the light of reason, we must let our minds be bold." The full context in which the phrase fir...

Dec 5, 2006 / The Editors

Unhappy Meal Unhappy Meal

Stuart Klawans reviews Fast Food Nation, a film that aspires to activism as it undermines its own anticorporate message.

Nov 30, 2006 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans

In Palestine, a Dream Deferred In Palestine, a Dream Deferred

Two new books explore fundamental Palestinian and Israeli concerns: The Iron Cage by Rashid Khalidi considers the Palestinians’ failure to achieve sovereignty, and One Country by A...

Nov 30, 2006 / Books & the Arts / Bashir Abu-Manneh

An Analysis of the War by the Newly Rehabilitated Trent Lott An Analysis of the War by the Newly Rehabilitated Trent Lott

Now here's a guy who knows whereof he speaks.

Nov 30, 2006 / Column / Calvin Trillin

A Life of His Own A Life of His Own

Victoria Glendinning's biography of Leonard Woolf looks at a remarkable public intellectual whose life and work were eclipsed by his more famous spouse.

Nov 22, 2006 / Books & the Arts / Brenda Wineapple

God’s Willing Executioners God’s Willing Executioners

God's War explores the barbaric clash of Christianity and Islam, and what happens when people follow religious voices that no one else can hear.

Nov 22, 2006 / Books & the Arts / Daniel Lazare

The Man Who Loved Children The Man Who Loved Children

Adam Gopnik's Through the Children's Gate details the trials of a very smug and special class of parents raising children in post-9/11 New York.

Nov 22, 2006 / Books & the Arts / Suzy Hansen

Class Consciousness Class Consciousness

Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford explores the contradictions of a social revolutionary possessed of an aristocrat's sense of the wrong and right kind of people.

Nov 22, 2006 / Books & the Arts / Charles Taylor

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