Features

• Ending Welfare Reform as We Know It

  Laurence Lynn

  Liberals who embrace welfare reform have conceded too much of the argument to the right. The main problem is not lazy, shiftless welfare mothers; it's the collapse of the lower middle-class economy.
• The Coming Budget Battle

  James Galbraith
• Separatist But Equal?

  Sarah Mosle

  Detroit's all-black academies are neither as bad as the critics claim nor as uplifting as their defenders insist. Considering the alternatives, they are worth a try.
• Journal of Graphic Fantasies

  Robert McIntyre
• Money Talks, Reform Walks

  Jonathan Cohn

  Last time around, campaign finance reform failed because it lacked public financing. Twenty years later, Congress seems determined to make the same mistake.
• Market, State, and Dystopia

  Robert Kuttner
• Going South

  Harley Shaiken

  NAFTA defenders say Mexico can't lure high-wage jobs away, but they are already heading across the border -- and the treaty will only make matters worse.
• Forecasting Follies

  Jay Greene

  Using models to predict presidential elections can be fun. Too bad they don't work.
• Blood Knots

  Elizabeth Bartholet

  Our society and our laws have an outrageous biological bias. The author's own odyssey suggests why adoption is a much-scorned but often superior alternative to reproductive heroics.
• Hispanic USA

  Ilan Stavans

  We are witnessing the Hispanization of the United States, not the Americanization of Hispanics.
• Lani Guinier's Constitution

  Randall Kennedy

  Guinier's critics were only half right. She is a political radical--but no quota queen. As a constitutionalist, she was neither separatist nor undemocratic. She would have gotten along nicely with James Madison.
• The New Immigration and the Old Civil Rights

  Peter Schuck

  The new immigration infuses America with new minority groups. This spells trouble for the old strategies of black uplift. New coalitions will require new concepts of disadvantage, affirmative action, and desert.
• The Left's Obsessive Opposition

  Richard Rothstein

  My liberal friends are being too hard on Bill Clinton. His mandate and congressional majority are wafer thin, and he's doing well with what he has. Would you rather have George Bush?
• The Gender Gap Mystique

  Karen Paget

  Women are newly influential in politics, but those who court the gender gap on the cheap will not succeed. Women's interests, issues, and voting preferences are every bit as complex as men's -- and demand equal respect.
• The Myth of the New Democrats

  Jeff Faux

  There isn't much new or Democratic about the New Democrats. They preach the same brand of conservative politics that has run this country into the ground.