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Our America

Lazarus and Liberty

- By Peter I. Rose

Extending “World Wide Welcome”

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my...

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Our America

Our America: Socialism or Barbarism

- By Jim Hicks

“If people don’t want to listen to you, what makes you think they want to hear from your sweater?” Fran Lebowitz

I want to tell the story of a T-shirt. Not material history—not the story of its cotton, possibly Egyptian, of the history of child labor in the Nile basin, or of recent efforts toward sustainable agriculture, and not of the T-shirt’s manufacture, in, say, Bangladesh, Cambodia, or India, and of the...

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Our America

Cultural Memory in the Present

- By Michael Rothberg

Dear President Tessier-Lavigne and Provost Drell,

I am writing to you as a scholar of the Holocaust and as a two-time Stanford University Press author. I was distressed to read this past week in various news sources that you plan to significantly cut support for the press. According to those who work closely with SUP, this cut could lead to the demise of one of the nation’s premier outlets for academic scholarship. It is difficult for me to understand how one of the world’s richest educational institutions could be so shortsighted as to risk such a dire outcome, even in a budget year that you have described as “tight.” I am writing in the hope that you can still be convinced to reverse this misguided decision and save the reputation of your university....

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Our America

Prove TINA Thought Wrong

- By Jim Hicks

So… I got the news yesterday, while listening to my car radio, and then almost drove off the road.

I immediately pulled over and checked my email: two of my friends from Hampshire College had already written, and a third would soon after. Like them, though mostly for them, I felt as if an unseen weight had suddenly lifted. I’m not by temperament pollyannish, and I do realize that the most difficult, the real work begins now. Nonetheless, the resignation of the Hampshire College president and several key members of its Board of Trustees makes that work possible, and the appointment of Ken Rosenthal as interim president seems an ideal solution. The way is now clear for Hampshire College to do what it does best: to reinvent itself, and, by doing so, to reboot liberal...

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Our America

Our America: All Life's Matter

- By Marya Zilberberg

Ever since the walk that Saturday, the modest but set-with-care-into-the-lawn homemade sign has haunted me, its simple black font on a rectangle of white foam core. I couldn't believe what I had seen, didn't know whether to laugh or to cry.

It stood in my neighbors’ yard, the same neighbors who on the day following the election had raised a flag, a thin white polyester rag with blue letters spelling the name of the winner. It stayed there for a few months, but had to come down, its cheap cloth and flimsy manufacturing no match for our winters. It was the same neighbors who on weekends collect crushed Budweiser cans and plastic iced tea jugs, emptied and hurled onto the sides of the roads of our small rural town out of careening pick-up trucks. They toss them along...

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Current Issue

Volume 60, Issue 4

Front Cover by Anna Schuleit Haber, Bloom, 2003. WHITE MUMS AND ORANGE TULIPS ON THE FIRST FLOOR OF AT THE MASSACHUSETTS MENTAL HEALTH CENTER, BOSTON. Commissioned by the Harvard Medical School and the Department of Mental Health of Massachsuetts.

Courtesy of the artist.

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