Helen Andrews

When he was a young social worker in St. Louis, Roger Baldwin was briefly engaged to Anna Louise Strong, who later published more books in defense of the Russian Bolsheviks and Chinese Maoists than any other English-speaking author and ended up buried in a revolutionary martyrs’ cemetery in . . . . Continue Reading »

In 1930, Lorenzo Greene traveled around the United States selling books about black history on behalf of his boss, Carter G. ­Woodson, the man who invented Black ­History Week (later Month), and his organization, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Greene had a degree from . . . . Continue Reading »

At a time when most of the news on television is at some level fake, the 2014 standoff at the Bundy ranch in Nevada stood out as a real event. Here was no pseudo-­spectacle thrown together for the cameras. Cliven Bundy, a Mormon rancher in Nevada, had a real quarrel with the Bureau of Land . . . . Continue Reading »

Sadly for those of us who love it, Malcolm’s early style of journalism cannot flourish in the world she helped to make, and other, less critical kinds of journalism have replaced it. Continue Reading »

The sinister character ­Salazar Slytherin, of Harry Potter fame, was named after Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, prime minister of Portugal from 1932 to 1968, whom J. K. Rowling had learned to revile during her two years living in Porto in the early nineties. By contrast, the American . . . . Continue Reading »

Mrs. America imagines that it can safely romanticize Schlafly’s pastel-colored suburban world because no woman today could possibly want to go back to it. Continue Reading »

In the summer of 1970, Elizabeth Hardwick may have been the best nonfiction prose writer in America, just as Jim Hines was the fastest man alive and Joe Frazier was the heavyweight champion of the world. She was the queen mother of the New York Review of Books, one of its four cofounders and . . . . Continue Reading »

The Socialist Manifesto:  The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality by bhaskar sunkara basic, 288 pages, $28 In the spring of 2019, even the staid old AFL-CIO began to dabble in guillotine imagery. The occasion was a dispute between Delta and the International Association of . . . . Continue Reading »

After a lifetime of impeccably correct opinions, Ian Buruma found himself on the wrong side of the liberal consensus in September 2018, when he was forced to resign as editor of the New York Review of Books for having commissioned a piece called “Reflections from a Hashtag” from the . . . . Continue Reading »

It is tempting to think of Las Casas as a voice crying in the wilderness, but in fact his campaign of denunciation brought him worldly success and the favor of the establishment. Continue Reading »