Essay

1065 RESULTS

Mar 1, 2006 City & country

Topics:

“Street-level Justice”: governing metropolitan public space

What have bus purchases, or garbage collection, or zoning laws, got to do with lofty principles like justice? Just give me a bit more efficiency and I’ll go quietly. Issues of efficiency can’t be neatly cordoned off from issues of distribution, of access, of sustainability, of opportunity, of security, and of voice. It’s all about ordering the urban public realm justly, and it’s more relevant than most people think.

Mar 1, 2006 City & country

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Falling in love with the New York intellectuals

It took a fierce group of 1930s journalists to show the world a new standard for truth, and how much truth should matter in personal and public life. The New York intellectuals insisted, in their ideas and their business, on both the continuing quest for truth, and the importance of living in the light of that truth. Whether or not their beliefs—tinged by Marxism and Modernism—were right, it’s the ferocity of the intellectuals that makes them significant—and charming.

Mar 1, 2006 City & country

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Replacing the Pan-Canadian Consensus

The 2006 election may prove to be the beginning of a political realignment, making a decisive shift away from what the authors term the “pan-Canadian consensus,” which has governed Canada since the 1960s. Ray Pennings and Michael Van Pelt propose a most interesting theory: revisiting “the very idea of a ‘Canadian consensus’ and ‘Canadian values,’ and asking whether there really is a homogeneous mainstream that represents, whether with a right or left emphasis, a clear path on which to govern.”

Dec 1, 2005 What is to be done?

Topics:

What is to be done… about schooling?

Aaron Belz thinks the contemporary high school classroom is a bastion of the bourgeois, that students who excel in this environment are gifted at waiting in line at the drinking fountain, and that the Socratic method is a form of hectoring. He offers an alternative way of doing . . . schooling.