Every issue has one section dedicated to a particular question. Collecting responses from a range of perspectives, these symposia prompt us to think about the values and ideas that shape our most urgent cultural and personal decisions.
“I always have had respect for people’s desire for there to be a form that will solve the problem of living. America is one of those forms—the nation is one of those forms.”
Midwestworld
It was the kind of day in Detroit, late in the course of a temperate summer, when the heat rebounds and the humidity returns with…
A Country Is a Country
A country is not for this or that. A country is not a chess club or a craft brewery; it is not for playing chess,…
Negative Growth
When I was growing up in an otherwise uneventful and impoverished neighborhood in Guadalajara, there was an event that never failed to excite us—the return…
Tar Heels, Alive
Every athletic event at the University of North Carolina ends the same way. The band strikes up “Hark the Sound” and we throw our arms…
Articles of Faith
Americans supposedly agree on certain truths. Timeless, universal and famously self-evident, they are the dearest tenets of what the sociologist Robert Bellah called “civil religion…
Blackness + America
America is not—as put forth by good-guy John Edwards, recently revived by renowned race-pedagogue David Simon—“two Americas,” but if it were, both of them would…
Conflict and Consensus
In 1953, the historian Daniel Boorstin testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
