Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and their critics embraced the notion that their work displayed an affinity to Russian and Yiddish literature, especially to the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, and Sholem Aleichem. Like these writers, the prominent American Jewish writers of the 1960s were understood as producing writing that emerged from their authentic, often negative emotions, work that voiced complaints. I first describe this generation's playful claiming of a Russian and Jewish genealogy, their definition of the Russian and Yiddish writers as a collective worthy of copying. I then use close readings of six passages to evaluate the American writers' assertions about their influence by the Russian and Yiddish ones. I compare the inset oral and written complaints in Roth and Bellow with those in Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Sholem Aleichem, both acknowledging their striking formal similarities and distinguishing the comic, satirically presented literary complaints of prerevolutionary Russia from the potentially more therapeutically oriented—albeit still satirical—literary complaints of postwar America. Finally, I look outside the literary texts to understand why it was appealing to 1960s American writers to think of themselves as influenced by prerevolutionary Russian and Yiddish verbal art. This article situates the American Jewish writers and their critics in an aural environment where Russian and Yiddish sounds were increasingly available in entertainment and where they were associated with authenticity and political opposition. In spite of the formal parallels among the American Jewish, Russian, and Yiddish literary complaints, and in spite of Roth and Bellow representing themselves compellingly as imitators, I argue that they need to be understood instead in their own national and temporal communicative context.

In 2008, when Michael McFaul was asked to leave his perch at Stanford and join an unlikely presidential campaign, he had no idea that he would find himself at the beating heart of one of today’s most contentious and consequential international relationships. As President Barack Obama’s adviser on Russian affairs, McFaul helped craft the United States’ policy known as “reset” that fostered new and unprecedented collaboration between the two countries. And then, as U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014, he had a front-row seat when this fleeting, hopeful moment crumbled with Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency. This riveting inside account combines history and memoir to tell the full story of U.S.-Russia relations from the fall of the Soviet Union to the new rise of the hostile, paranoid Russian president. From the first days of McFaul’s ambassadorship, the Kremlin actively sought to discredit and undermine him, hassling him with tactics that included dispatching protesters to his front gates, slandering him on state media, and tightly surveilling him, his staff, and his family.

From Cold War to Hot Peace is an essential account of the most consequential global confrontation of our time.

Word embeddings are a powerful machine-learning framework that represents each English word by a vector. The geometric relationship between these vectors captures meaningful semantic relationships between the corresponding words. In this paper, we develop a framework to demonstrate how the temporal dynamics of the embedding helps to quantify changes in stereotypes and attitudes toward women and ethnic minorities in the 20th and 21st centuries in the United States. We integrate word embed- dings trained on 100 y of text data with the US Census to show that changes in the embedding track closely with demographic and occupation shifts over time. The embedding captures societal shifts—e.g., the women’s movement in the 1960s and Asian immi- gration into the United States—and also illuminates how specific adjectives and occupations became more closely associated with certain populations over time. Our framework for temporal anal- ysis of word embedding opens up a fruitful intersection between machine learning and quantitative social science.

Using new data on roll-call voting of US state legislators and public opinion in their districts, we explain how ideological polarization of voters within districts can lead to legislative polarization. In so-called “moderate” districts that switch hands between parties, legislative behavior is shaped by the fact that voters are often quite heterogeneous: the ideological distance between Democrats and Republicans within these districts is often greater than the distance between liberal cities and conservative rural areas. We root this intuition in a formal model that associates intradistrict ideological heterogeneity with uncertainty about the ideological location of the median voter. We then demonstrate that among districts with similar median voter ideologies, the difference in legislative behavior between Democratic and Republican state legislators is greater in more ideologically heterogeneous districts. Our findings suggest that accounting for the subtleties of political geography can help explain the coexistence of polarized legislators and a mass public that appears to contain many moderates.

Why has economic inequality risen dramatically over the past few decades even in democracies where individuals could vote for more redistribution? We experimentally study how individuals respond to inequality and find that subjects generally take from richer and give to poorer individuals. However, this behavior removes only a fraction of inequality. Moreover, individuals who give to those who are poorer are generally not the same individuals who also take from others who are richer. These results offer an explanation for the absence of policy interventions that could effectively counter rising differences in wealth: Voters are divided on how to react to inequality in ways that make it difficult to build majority coalitions willing to back political redistribution.

Listen to a podcast with Ken Scheve on themes addressed in this article, on FSI's WorldClass.