FOR A generation, New York's ruins were its greatest spectacles. Now many New York neighborhoods have accelerated from abandonment to gentrification in what feels like ten seconds or less.

THE NEWEST way to vault from routine political notability into the stratosphere of presidential prospects is to write a memoir. David Greenberg reviews the recent spate of campaign books by Clinton, Edwards, Obama, and Richardson.

LAST SPRING, Britain's 120,000-strong University and College Union voted to endorse a motion to boycott Israeli universities, calling on British academics to condemn the "complicity of Israeli academia in the occupation." Martha Nussbaum, Mohammed Abed, and Murray Hausknecht debate the legitimacy--and political utility--of academic boycotts.

GHOST, DOUBLES, the family romance, the madness of art-these ingredients have been part of the Zuckerman novels from the first. But there is something new in
Exit Ghost, an element of the uncanny that turns the novel into a ghost story in a different sense. William Deresiewicz reviews Philip Roth's newest novel.

A DETERMINED offensive is underway. Its target is in the Middle East, and it is an old target: the legitimacy of Israel. The offensive comes from within parts of the liberal and left intelligentsia in the United States and Europe.

"UNION STRUCTURES look much as they did a hundred years ago, rigid but not necessarily coherent hierarchies." Alan Howard explores the possibility of a successful international trade union movement.

IN THE APRIL ELECTIONS, French President Nicolas Sarkozy won 53 percent of the votes, running on a campaign that advocated center-right foreign and domestic policy. Dissent co-editor Mitchell Cohen, Philippe Askenazy, Françoise Gaspard, Nancy L. Green, and Jean-Baptiste Soufron consider how the elections reflect a dramatically different France.

There has been considerable--and heated--argument over the potential exit strategies from Iraq. Trudy Rubin, the foreign affairs columnist of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Read the opening statements: Trudy Rubin, Michael Walzer, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Sohail Hashmi, and Gerard Powers.

OVER THE past several decades, there has been fierce debate over the role of religion in American politics. From the late 1970s and on, religious conservatives played an increasingly vociferous public role. Now there seems to be a shift in mood and a number of prominent authors and scientists have published books in the past year that advocate a "New Atheism."

WHETHER OUT OF a willful desire to act impolitic or a simple ignorance of political calculations, Joseph Stiglitz neither looks nor behaves like a politician. Yet, Stiglitz has done more than perhaps any other individual to influence the unfolding political debate about globalization.

FOR THE first time in civilized history, perhaps for the first time in all of history, we have been forced to live with the suppressed knowledge that the smallest facets of our personality or the most minor projection of our ideas could mean equally well that we might still be doomed to die as a cipher in some vast statistical operation.

Once the 'jewel of Africa,' Zimbabwe now ranks #4 on the Failed States Index of Foreign Policy. The country's once-promising economy is in a grotesque free-fall. Robert Mugabe's government has killed opposition activists, closed newspapers, and jailed journalists. Susie Linfield tracks Mugabe's disastrous rule through five books.

OVER THE LAST century, the link between sex and reproduction has weakened. Feminist activism, aided by technological advances, has given middle-class women in the United States widespread access to effective contraception and safe, legal abortion and a burgeoning fertility industry has, for thousands, taken baby-making from the bedroom to the laboratory.

One of the most laudatory reviews of The Golden Notebook when it first appeared in 1963 was by this magazine's founding editor, Irving Howe. He was delighted to discover a made-up universe-in this case, a universe dominated by women-that was such a realistic reflection of a certain part of the Old Left: the communist intelligentsia and their fellow travelers circa 1956.

NEOCONSERVATISM EMERGED in the late 1960s, when a series of intellectuals associated with Commentary and the Public Interest began moving to the right. The term, however, has a long prehistory, appearing as early as 1883 "in a periodical that featured excerpts of Karl Marx's new book, Capital."

IDENTIFYING DINESH D'SOUZA as a collaborationist is not something that should necessarily comfort the left. It means acknowledging precisely what many on the left have refused to-that what many moderate Muslims identify as democracy is in fact profoundly undemocratic.

IN FEBRUARY, the International Court of Justice ruled that Serbia failed to prevent genocide in Srebrenica but had not been directly responsible for it.

WHAT IF economic self-interest caused the transformation of the Democratic South into the predominantly Republican South? Dan T. Carter reviews five books on the political changes of the South.

AS GENOCIDAL DESTRUCTION in the Darfur region of western Sudan enters its fifth year, we must accept not only the overwhelming disgrace of such prolonged human agony but register important shifts in the nature of the destruction.

U.S. HEALTH care needs a serious overhaul. Dissent's Jessica Sinsheimer reports that "Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four are more likely to be uninsured than any other group in the industrialized world." Theodore Marmor offers one solution: universal medical coverage.

DESPITE PROTESTS AND threats made by Turkey's military, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's AK Party received 47 percent of Turkey's votes in the July 22 national elections. Daniele Castellani Perelli talks with Seyla Benhabib about the AK Party, Turkish nationalism, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and what's next for Turkey.

RUSSIA IS NOW in its second decade of post-communism and despite a GDP that has grown by 50 percent, the country has one of the worst health services in the world and an authoritarian political system that faces almost no opposition. It's on the road to capitalism, but one fraught with crime and corruption.

REVIEWING NICK Cohen's What's Left?, Johann Hari asks, ?Did this strange niche in Anglo-American politics--of which I was a part, for a time--produce any enduring insights?? In an online debate, Cohen and Hari wrangle over the Dissent review, liberalism, and what it means to have George Orwell as a lodestar.

THIS PAST SUMMER marked the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and yet New Orleans's troubled public school system has yet to fully rebuild itself. "The bottom line is that more than half the public school students in New Olreans attend charter schools. Now, instead of centralized bad judgment, New Orleans has diversified bad judgment."

ACCORDING TO THE U.N.'s High Commissioner for Refugees, 50,000 to 100,000 Iraqis leave their country every month. Since the 2003 invasion, the U. S. has granted only 500 Iraqis refugee status.

RIOTS ONCE WERE common place in U.S. cities. Michael B. Katz investigates why American cities have been relatively quiet while Europe's have recently seen much upheaval.

THESE DAYS RICHARD Serra is not interested in creating a sculpture that can be looked at as a visual object. Instead, he has given himself over to his longstanding concern with the relationship between a work of art and the person viewing it. His interest is in the process of seeing, not the process of representation.

WHAT LESSONS ABOUT the export of democracy are to be learned from the Iraq experience? Daniele Archibugi, Ofra Bengio, Seyla Benhabib, Paul Berman, editor Mitchell Cohen, Thomas Cushman, John Lister, and Shibley Telhami respond.

IN THE UNITED STATES, the political future is constrained, for better or worse, by constitutional arrangements but in China the political future is wide open. Daniel A. Bell reports from Beijing.

ROBERT POLIDORI'S PHOTOGRAPHS of New Orleans challenge our sense of how the world is supposed to look. Cars stand upside down. Uprooted trees rest on houses. Polidori?s post-flood New Orleans is a collage of random disorder.

WITH A DEMOCRATIC majority in Congress, Nelson Lichtenstein argues that "we need an ideological offensive against the anti-union right." Jim McNeill notes that "if global economy's new rules make companies ever leaner and meaner, then maybe labor should fight to change the rules, not coddle the companies."

MICHAEL CHABON'S NEWEST novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, is set in a counterfactual world--one where the lingua franca of Jews remains Yiddish and the Jewish homeland is situated along the north Pacific, not the Mediterranean.

IS IT POSSIBLE to oppose the death penalty and still be in favor of killing tyrants? Dissent editor Michael Walzer investigates.

IRAN CAN PLAY a key role but this positive future will only be realized if it is based on trust, transparency, and on the peaceful leadership of a great nation--not on hegemonial aspirations.

NOTHING, I REMEMBER nothing," the middle-aged witness insisted to the court. "I was sick during the genocide." She was standing before a man accused of multiple murders, an audience of her neighbors, and a row of judges at a session of gacaca.

SOCIALISTS AND LIBERALS come from different--and sometimes antagonistic--ideological traditions and when they met in twentieth-century France, the consequence was an uncertain but original democratic equilibrium.

CAN PHILOSOPHY SAVE the Middle East? A Canadian professor teaches Greek philosophy at al Quds University with Sari Nusseibeh.

"PUTTING MORAL THEORY into practice--never very easy--is a daunting task in a war zone," Sari Nusseibeh notes in his recent memoir Once Upon a Country.

WHAT THREAT DOES Iran pose in today's world? Shlomo Avineri, Michael W. Doyle, Yitzhak Nakash, Suzanne Nossel, and Anne-Marie Slaughter respond.

JEROME SLATER AND Dissent editor Michael Walzer debate the implications of 'just war' theory in the context of the Lebanon-Israel war.

JOHANN HARI REVIEWS six controversial books that cover the Islamic presence in Europe. "For Europeans who pride themselves on multiculturalism and tolerance, the continent seems stranger and sadder."

TODD GITLIN, FRANCES Fox Piven and Dissent editor Michael Walzer agree that the left has yet to disappear from American politics--the question, however, is how will it sustain itself?

WHEN IT DEBUTED in 1979, Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party threatened the status quo on several levels. It was at once a challenge to of the sacrosanct, apolitical aesthetic object in 'high art' as well as homage to crafts.

MANY QUESTIONS WERE left unanswered in The Sopranos's finale, including whether mobster Tony Soprano would ever realize the irreconcilability between his brutal business practices and the genteel, suburban normalcy he craved.