Letter from the editors

ANALYSIS IN BRIEF

Lance Selfa
The right on the defensive
The passage of health care reform gives the Democrats new legs

PLUS: Helen Redmond on the health care bill—prescribing aspirin for cancer; Joel Geier on contradictions in the economic recovery

COLUMN

Phil Gasper • Critical thinking
The imperial war in Afghanistan

FEATURES

Gillian Russom
Obama’s neoliberal agenda for education

Gillian Russom
The case against charter schools

Adam Sanchez
Disaster schooling: How the “shock doctrine” is playing out in New Orleans, Chicago, and Detroit

Arundhati Roy
Bhumkal: Walking with the Comrades
The author of The God of Small Things travels with India’s rural rebels

HISTORY

Danny Lucia
Bringing misery out of hiding: The unemployed movement of the 1930s

FEATURE REVIEW

Tom Twiss and Paul Le Blanc
Revolutionary betrayed: Trotsky and his biographer
Robert Service’s widely-acclaimed work is full of inflated assertions and shocking inaccuracies

BOOK REVIEWS

Jeff Bale
Defector from the school reform consensus
Review of Diane Ravitch: The Death and Life of the Great American School System

PLUS: Sherry Wolf on the fight for civil rights up North; Petrino DiLeo on the next debt bubble; Martin Smith on Race and radicalism in the Civil War; Dennis Kosuth on the 1989 revolutions in the Eastern Bloc; Lee Wengraf on women in the American gulag; Matt Swagler on the myth of “heterosexual Africa”; Ragina Johnson on same-sex marriage in practice