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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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Inspired by “The Rebel’s Clinic,” Adam Shatz’s new work on Frantz Fanon, the journalist Robert Dreyfuss recalls an early visit to Algeria and discusses some of the titles he has turned to, including Shatz’s influential book, for a deeper understanding of one of the central and most brutal narratives of modern colonialism. Five decades ago, […]

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