The Legacy of Anita Hill, Then and Now

Her Senate testimony made her into a feminist icon, but her new book underscores her enduring career as a professor and writer.

Patricia J. Williams

A Thank-You Note to Anita Hill

Because you spoke out twenty years ago, women no longer shrug off sexual harassment—we press charges.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Black Women Still in Defense of Ourselves

Sexual harassment had been a common experience of black women’s work life since they arrived in America, and it was black women plaintiffs who first comprehended that sexual abuse at work was discrimination. 

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw

How Anita Hill Changed the World

From SlutWalks to class action lawsuits to ordinary women feeling empowered to speak out against sexual harassment—that’s change we can believe in.
 

Katha Pollitt

Taking Up the Legacy of Anita Hill

She put sexual harassment on the map, but twenty years later, more than half of all high school and college age women report being harassed.

Jessica Valenti

Should Obama Face a Challenge in the Democratic Primary?

Facing a primary challenger might force Obama to embrace progressive ideals—and he can’t win 2012 if he doesn’t.

John Nichols

Can Marine Le Pen Win in France?

The new leader of the National Front has risen in the polls by borrowing arguments from the left. But critics worry: has she turned against her father’s bigotry, or merely made it more presentable?

Agnès Catherine Poirier

Occupy America

As Occupy Wall Street spreads, more than 115 parallel occupations have cropped up in cities around the world. Is this the beginning of something new?

the Editors

Occupying Wall Street, Building a Movement

The OWS phenomenon has inspired millions. If it links up with the slow, difficult work of movement-building, it can bring about systemic change.

Peter Dreier

Noted.

Ari Berman on the GOP voting laws, Robert Gangi on NYPD drug arrests, Alia Malek on the Irvine 11 and Peter Rothberg on Wangari Maathai

Various Contributors

The UK’s Labour Party Finds Its Voice

Ed Miliband has began to nudge his party in a new direction—a left populism that just might challenge Britain’s real rulers, in corporate boardrooms and in Parliament.

D.D. Guttenplan

Awlaki Assassination Puts Obama Above the Law

Welcome to the Drone Empire, in which the president's executioners can kill without legal restraint.

Alexander Cockburn

Ban Birth Control? They Wouldn’t Dare…

Wake up, sleepyheads: the antichoicers are coming for contraception.

Katha Pollitt

CEO

Calvin Trillin

The Wrong Moral Revolution: On Michael Barnett

To see humanitarianism everywhere is not to see it at all.

David Rieff

Shelf Life

Jean-Patrick Manchette’s Fatale, Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I Will Write About This Place, Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s The History of Costaguana

Alexandra Schwartz

Getting to Denmark: On Francis Fukuyama

The Origins of Political Order, a work of total world history, pits the old Fukuyama against the new.

Thomas Meaney

Letters

Our Readers and William Greider

Puzzle No. 3210

Joshua Kosman and Henri Picciotto