GEOFF BOTTOMS appreciates the local touch brought to a production of Dickens’s perennial classic
Latest editorial
Disunited states
GAVIN O’TOOLE explores how US federalism has been exploited by Republicans, but remains the best arena for progressive solutions
Charlottesville ‘Unite the Right’ rally enters Emancipation Park in August 2017
[Anthony Crider/flickr/CC]
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a production whose design and cartoonish acting overwhelms the close scrutiny of characters
SUSAN DARLINGTON enjoys the raucous familiarity of a traditional topsy-turvy pantomime
RON JACOBS introduces the latest novel by the best writer of US working-class fiction writing today
HENRY BELL is fascinated by the underlying curiosities and contradictions of one of the great poets of the Mediterranean
DAVID RENTON recommends a books that explores the ways in which disabled people are made to feel both of and not part of this world
Laboratories Against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics
by Jacob M Grumbach, Princeton, £25
A reflex apparent in US political science after Reagan saw a reinvigorated federalism as a source of innovation in economics, education, and social policy.
The states, so the argument went, were emerging as “laboratories of democracy” in which creative governors experimenting with ideas that went beyond traditional party politics were harbingers of a new “Progressive Era”.
How times change.
Similar stories
GAVIN O’TOOLE welcomes, and recommends a a candid, evidence-based record of Britain’s role in the slaughter visited by Israel upon the Palestinians
The left must avoid shouting ‘racist’ and explain that the socialist alternative would benefit all
Despite the US withdrawal from Ukraine and economic self-harm from sanctions, European centrists maintain their bellicosity to justify military spending and distract from neoliberalism's failures, writes PRABHAT PATNAIK
GAVIN O’TOOLE welcomes a masterful study of gang behaviour in the favelas of Sao Paulo