The Trade-Offs of Trade

"The problem is, the choices we make in the market don't fully reflect our values as workers or as citizens. I didn't want our community bookstore in Cambridge, Mass., to close (as it did last fall) yet I still bought lots of books from Amazon.com. In addition, we may not see the larger bargain when our own job or community isn't directly at stake. I don't like what's happening to airline workers, but I still try for the cheapest fare I can get."

Robert Reich in The New York Times considers how Americans can undermine themselves while looking for the best deal.

Galbraith versus Friedman: or, Fact versus Faith, part two?

Writing in The Boston Globe, Harvard fellow Richard Parker contrasts two icons of twentieth-century economics.

Carving Out an Alternative

Editors of The American Prospect attempt to define an American foreign policy between, as the March cover puts it, Chomsky and Cheney.

Fact versus Faith

Here is another stimulating article from The New Republic's anniversary issue on liberalism. In this one, Jonathan Chait compares the pragmatist emphasis of liberalism against the ideologically driven faith of contemporary conservatism.

Bring Back the Canals

In its February edition, the Venice Beachhead printed suggestions for what to do with the traffic circle at the intersection of Main and Windward, just northeast of the boardwalk in Venice, Los Angeles. The paper also included a map of the area from eighty-five years ago. This map from the past oddly provides a way forward: bring back the canals.
Venice was famous for its canals when developer Abbot Kinney first created the neighborhood one hundred years ago. And while most of the canals were filled in and paved over beginning in the 1920s, those that remain, farther southeast of Windward and Main, have become attractions once again for both visitors and residents. Reviving the canals would benefit Venitians and the thousands who come to enjoy the beach and boardwalk all year long.
Having all the canals return may be too ambitious, but, using the circle as a focal point, reviving some of the canals could greatly improve the district, making it a landmark in the city. A renewed network of canals could travel east from the circle (the Lagoon on the map) along Grand Blvd. to Cabrillo (not pictured), along Cabrillo, and back down Windward (labelled as Lion on the map). Bridges for cars could traverse Riveria and Andalusia avenues for those who live of the interior area, and vistors travelling to the beach on N Venice Blvd. would be treated as they passed Grand to the sight of residents boating along.
How to revive the canals brings up many questions, of course, but let's start asking and answering them.

Chronicling Higher Education

"The recent history of elite higher education is usually told as a glorious story of democratization. But future historians may look back and see something different: a restrictive age of old money (1900–1950), followed by an interregnum of broadened access (from the 1950s into the 1980s) and then a period (circa 1990–?) in which new money poured in...."

Andrew Delbanco of Columbia University gives an overview of the evolution of American higher education in this article (the first of two parts) in The New York Review of Books.

The Party of Greater New England?

In The American Prospect, Michael Lind offers yet another provocative piece of writing--this time he places today's Democrats in a long historical line of minority parties.

A Deist Nation

Brooke Allen in The Nation reminds readers of the Founding Fathers' actual religious views.

Addition: Susan Jacoby in Mother Jones discusses the lack of godliness in the Constitution.

Lest We Forget...

An older (three months) article from The American Prospect on the 2004 election, but Democrats should remember Greg Sargents's points as the party moves toward 2006.

American Exceptionalism

Daniel Gross in Slate reviews a new book about the American character.

TNR at 90

On the occasion of turning 90, The New Republic looks at the state of liberalism.