A Website of the Radical Imagination
Start with Katha Pollitt. In the April 18 issue of The Nation, she unsurprisingly holds forth (unsurprisingly) on the controversy surrounding Theresa Schindler Schiavo. She comes down, of course, on the side of pulling the tube (or as she nicely says, “Schiavo’s feeding tube was withdrawn”). There’s no real argument offered, but she makes … Read more
‘I am me.’ Pessoa. Once upon a time–How now can I begin like that? It’s June 30, 2000, it’s morning still cool although the murderous heat is waiting impatiently in the high branches of the eucalyptus. You shake your head no. Heat is an abstraction. Those are four black crows, you insist, the same ones … Read more
Nearly forty years ago today, the United Auto Workers (UAW) successfully organized a foreign auto transplant in the United States. The dismal denouement of that sequence in labor history is critical to understanding the defeat of the UAW’s organizing drive at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee in February 2014. Back in 1978, the UAW … Read more
We asked a number of First contributors to comment on the 2004 election. Our respondents came back to us at different moments during the campaign so we have dated their responses. No Half-Stepping By Lawrence Goodwyn This is the most important election in the country since 1936 and poses the same question: what kind of … Read more
William Greider tries to “explain power in plain English” to everyday people. But he’s always ready to learn from them as well. His new book, The Soul of Capitalism, calls attention to citizens whose businesses and working lives hint at how Americans might remake our society. While First of the Month will always be responsive … Read more
Wesley Hogan’s “Many Minds, One Heart” (Duke University Dissertation, 2000) stands as the freshest work on the Civil Rights Movement since Charles Payne’s I’ve Got the Light of Freedom. Hogan’s dissertation is both a painstaking piece of scholarship and an urgent message to the grassroots. A natural democrat, Hogan identifies with everyday … Read more
I’ve been studying social movements for about 35 years and the more I study, the more I feel a distance between what I think I know and what is generally thought to be the essence of politics in this culture. And that distance keeps growing. George Bernard Shaw once said that when people learn something … Read more