We welcome our readers to this first issue of the Washington Spectator’s new monthly format. It’s still the portable Spectator, but there’s more space for the longer reporting pieces readers have requested—you’ll see the dividend when you read Lou Dubose’s cover story on how the Voting Rights Act has helped preserve democracy, and Jim Goldston’s […]

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No Democracy Without Reform The last election was an absolutely disgusting spectacle in Ohio, largely but not totally due to the stunning influx of TV and radio commercials from the so-called super-PACs. [“Smart Money,” Washington Spectator, December 1, 2012] Many of us just about wore out the mute button on our TV clickers! It seems […]

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Reviewed: Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis by Mark Binelli (Metropolitan Books, 336 pp., $28.00). I have no plans to visit North Korea, but there was a time when I longed to see it out of sheer curiosity. Then I read cartoonist Guy Delisle’s graphic travel memoir Pyongyang, and […]

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The Chronicle of Higher Education published a blog post by journalist Naomi Schaefer Riley entitled “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations.” Schaefer Riley argued that there are “no legitimate debates about the problems that plague the black community…happening in black-studies departments” and that Black Studies has outlived its usefulness. […]

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Reviewed: Deception: The Untold Story of East-West Espionage Today by Edward Lucas (Walker & Company, 384 pp., $26.00). Communism is dead, but the threat from Russia is still very much alive—and we in the West are dangerously complacent in the face of this menace. That is the central thesis of Edward Lucas’s Deception: The Untold Story of […]

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