There is a widespread sentiment in the non- MAGA universe that this particular moment is the worst that America has ever experienced. History tells us otherwise. In Yuval Noah Harari’s book Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, he asserts, “History isn’t the study of the past; it is […]

Read more

GUEST ESSAY Americans from all corners of the country are speaking out against the venality and destructive intentions of the incoming political leadership. The Spectator will periodically feature these voices from arenas outside our customary lens. Here literary scholar Randy Fertel, who has written extensively on improvisation as a taproot of contemporary culture, offers a […]

Read more

A pair of books released weeks before the election, written by key players in the post-2016 investigation of Donald Trump’s multiple ties to Russia, brings our attention back to something that Republicans say is a hoax and Democrats seem all too ready to forget: that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin apparently has leverage over the Manhattan […]

Read more

Last week we published a chronicle of Shirley Chisholm’s experience as the first Black woman to serve in Congress, and later, to run for president, excerpted from The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973 by Clara Bingham. The following account of the first abortion speak-out is also excerpted from Bingham’s revelatory and intimate oral […]

Read more

Shirley Chisholm was the first Black woman to serve in Congress (elected in 1968) and the first Black woman to run for President (1972).  The writer Clara Bingham’s absorbing and poignant oral history, The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973, depicts the impediments faced by the pioneering politician from Brooklyn—barriers which today more than […]

Read more