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“One night after a meeting she asks me if she can talk to me. I nod sure, she sits down and starts to tell me, very hesitantly, that there’s this man she’s in love with. I think she’s about to tell me she’s afraid to sleep with him, and I start to tell her if you’re in love there’s nothing wrong wi…

As for the individual Communist at the branch level, four-fifths of the time he followed Party directives, one-fifth of the time he was on his own; on his own, he was supposed to respond to whatever happened in the course of a day in the neighborhood. (“What exactly does that mean?” I ask Lanzetti.…

Eric was a very smart kid. The force of his personality, coupled with his brains and drive, destined him to live out the life he has indeed lived out, a life filled with event and focus, large and dramatic doings. He won a scholarship to Brown University at a time when it was unthinkable for someon…

[...] Communists remember the credo very much as Orwell remembers Spain: as characteristic of a time and a place when men and women experienced genuine comradeship, and were equalized by the deeper socialist definition of value and being; an experience closely parallel to that of the pioneer societ…

Diana rises from the couch and walks across the room to pour herself another drink. She stands in silence with her back to me. Then she turns around, leans against the mahogany bar, and says: “I was vain, shallow, pretty, and energetic. Mad for sexual success and popularity, and yes, secretly wanti…