Jim Sleeper

With the fall semester ending and other developments sidelining the controversy about the controversy over racism and “unsafety” at American colleges, might those of us who weighed in on it step back and acknowledge that, on the one hand, student protesters aren’t as coddled and unjustified as their critics have proclaimed but, on the other […]

Spencer Stone, Alek Skarlatos, and Anthony Sadler had more than the great reflexes, courage, pure luck — and, in Skarlatos and Stones’ cases, the military and medical training — necessary to subdue an armed terrorist and to aid a victim on a high-speed train from Amsterdam to Paris. The three young Americans also had the […]

Last month an instructor at the elite Groton School — founded in 1884 by, among others, J.P. Morgan and Endicott Peabody, its first rector, a descendant of Massachusetts Puritans — wrote me to take issue with some kind words I’ve published in this summer’s DEMOCRACY journal (subsequently adapted and posted by The Atlantic) about the […]

A particular memory has kept me from sharing the anguish of the “What might have been” essays written this week about liberals’ four-time loss of Mario Cuomo as their tribune: the most recent loss, of course, having been in his passing, at 82; and, before that, his 1994 loss of a fourth term as governor […]

With roughly 80% of Alabama whites voting Republican and 90% of African-Americans voting Democrat, it’s been easy for the state’s legislative leaders to deny they had any explicitly racial intent in compressing black voters into a few electoral districts and “whitening” the neighboring districts to elect more Republicans. Districting along party lines is the prerogative […]

When Hong Kong students named their recent demonstrations for democratic elections “Occupy,” they reminded me not only of the Americans demonstrating for economic justice in 2012 but also of Beijing protesters who carried a “Goddess of Democracy” modeled on our Statue of Liberty across Tienanmen Square in 1989. Now that Texas and the conservative majority […]

As a stopped clock is right twice a day, the American pundits I criticized here in May and June — Leon Wieseltier, David Brooks, William Kristol – were right to warn that Vladimir Putin is a menace and that his Russia is evolving into a danger to liberal democracy. It doesn’t matter that Putin didn’t […]

As I read the much-ballyhooed debate between the writers Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jonathan Chait about race in America, followed by Coates’ magisterial case for reparations to African-Americans, I couldn’t help recalling my own observation to The Atlantic in 1997, that “it’s difficult to say anything about race that hasn’t been said before; difficult to say […]