The Women Returns

The Women—Clare Boothe Luce’s 1936 Broadway play and 1939 hit movie—is like a glorious, screwball, cinematic female vampire: It will not die. In fact, it is playing well right now in a big-budget 2008 update written and directed by Diane English, who is best known as the creator, writer, and producer of the highly successful sitcom Murphy Brown.

All of The Women’s more than one hundred parts are written for women, and its wide variety of female roles and fabulous dialogue is irresistible to actresses. The 1939 version starred the luminous Norma Shearer as Mary H... More

Ground Zero Seven Years Later

On the day after presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain stopped campaigning to place flowers at the World Trade Center site on the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I went there myself. Work has progressed since I visited Ground Zero a year ago, but when you look into the pit from which New York’s new World Trade Center will rise, you don’t get much of a sense of the future as you stare through the chain-link fence surrounding the construction.

Fights over design and money have made any progress difficult to come by. Foundation work dominates the activity at the... More

The Palin Family Album

In defending the privacy of Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, Barack Obama has been the model of decency.  “I think people’s families are off limits.  And people’s children are especially off limits,” he observed after the media pounced on the story that Palin’s 17-year-old daughter Bristol was five-months pregnant.

But Obama was wrong about Bristol Palin and wrong about Trig, Sarah Palin’s 5-month-old Down syndrome child. Sarah Palin has already made both a part of the 2008 presidential debate—and the Democrats ignore her politicization of her family alb... More

Palintology: Can John McCain's Running Mate Get the Hillary Votes?

Last Friday, the media were surprised when John McCain chose Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate.  I, too, was surprised, but as someone who grew up in Alaska and still has family there, I am not dismissive of Palin.  She is both talented and tough—a genuine conservative populist.

I met Sarah Palin in 2006 when she was a gubernatorial candidate in Alaska. She was opposing Governor Frank Murkowski in a bid to get on the GOP ticket. I was working as a waitress at the convention cent... More

Who are You Calling Stupefied?

According to Mark Bauerlein, the Millennial generation, the approximately 80 million of us born in the United States between 1980 and 1995, takes top honors for collective dim-wittedness. In his new book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes our Future, Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, argues that Millennials have been endowed with unlimited access to knowledge, but we have never served ourselves from the intellectual buffet before... More

Black List

This Monday, HBO airs the new documentary The Black List. A collaboration between former New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell and photographer-filmmaker Timothy Greenfield-Sanders (best known for his pictures of wounded Iraq War veterans), The Black List could not be more timely in its interviews of 23 prominent black Americans. At the heart of the documentar... More

J.M.W. Turner’s Paintings and 9/11

With 165 works, the majority of them oils and watercolors, the current exhibit of the English painter J. M. W. Turner at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art qualifies as a blockbuster. But the exhibit, which lasts through September 21 and is the first major retrospective in America devoted to Turner, has not won uniform praise. Reviewers have complained that the sight of so many Turners in one place reminds them of his repetitiveness.

It is a tough charge to beat.  Turner began exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1796, when he was just 21, and he was productive for the next 50... More

Dissent UpFront: Welcome to Dissent's New Web-only Section

Today, Dissent UpFront makes its formal debut on our Web site. We have informally been running online articles since last summer. Our experimental period is over. We think that a Web-only section devoted to brief, timely pieces—shorts—as well as longer essays, debates, and interviews complements the quarterly articles that are Dissent’s bread and butter. But we are old fashioned in our insistence that the shorts and essays found in UpFront are not to be mistaken for a blog. We welcome personal pieces, but the standards that apply for writing in the magazine are the... More

The New Yorker Cartoon

Just when we thought the age of political correctness was over, we are forced to concede that the reports of its death were greatly exaggerated.  Nothing illustrates this state of affairs more than the controversy aroused by the New Yorker’s July 21 cover.

The cover, which is by Barry Blitt, is a satire on the idea that Barack Obama and his wife are secret Muslims in league with terrorists and have a deep hatred of America. The Obamas are shown standing in the Oval Office of t... More

The Irish Say 'No'

On Thursday June 12, Irish citizens voted no to the Lisbon Treaty, an EU agreement that would have redistributed power within the European Commission by creating a full-time EU president and a single foreign-policy head. The ‘no’ vote came as a surprise to many, including Irish bookmakers who paid out tens of thousands of Euros when the polls closed because they thought a yes vote was a sure thing.  After all, Ireland has prospered more than any other county from being a part of the European Union.

When... More

The Farm Bill and Global Hunger

The current farm bill, officially the Food Conservation and Energy Act of 2008, comes with a strange cast of critics and supporters. George W. Bush and the New York Times editorial board both opposed the bill’s passage, while a combination of rural Republican senators and liberal activist groups, such as ACORN and MoveOn, supported it.

These odd alliances were no accident. The $289 billion farm bill was designed to create them. Since the 1960s, rural congressmen have demanded that each farm bill include generous food aid programs, in order to gain the support of urban r... More

The New York Inflation Index

Inflation is slowly eating away at America’s standard of living.  A stop at the gas pump makes that evident for anyone who drives to work, and so do the Labor Department figures that show that last year’s wholesale prices rose by seven and a half percent—the fastest pace in more than 26 years.

But in New York City, the inflation indicator that seems to me most salient comes from how much money people give when asked for a handout. With the ever-increasing economic pressure, for more and more New Yorkers, the new going rate seems to be a dollar.

It is as if an implicit u... More

What U.S. Sports Can Learn from Wimbeldon

I spent the Fourth of July weekend watching the Wimbledon Tennis Championships on television. I have done this for the last ten years, and this year I was amply rewarded. In a four-hour and forty-eight minute men’s singles final, the longest in Wimbledon history, Rafael Nadal, a twenty-two-year-old up-and-coming player from Majorca, beat the reigning Wimbledon champion, Switzerland’s Roger Federer, in a match that was brilliant from start to finish.

But for me the greatest reward at Wimbledon came from the fans and its All England Club setting. In contrast to America’s professional ... More

Letter from Montana

In winning 40 of Montana’s 56 counties in the June 3 primary, Barack Obama showed what he can do in a predominantly white red state with the right kind of campaign. His victory is an important omen for the presidential election.

When Obama’s offices opened their doors in Montana in the beginning of 2008, he seemed like a long shot to win the Democratic primary. Montana has a black population of just four-tenths of one percent, and its largest city has only about 100,000 residents. The median income is far below the national average. There were no automatic votes for Obama in M... More

The Hillary Nutcracker

Despite the recent denouement of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, a device called the “Hillary Nutcracker” has retained its popularity on Amazon.com, where the item has not one, not two, but three different distributors. It is a plastic Hillary Clinton action figure that cracks open walnuts when they are placed between her legs. Clinton appears in a demure navy blue pantsuit, complete with a turquoise blouse and pearls.

One distributor will even send you the nut-cracking senator in her very own action figure box with an inspiring stars and stripes background. The... More

Olympic Boycott: Beijing and Berlin

Almost everywhere the Olympic torch goes on its 21-country, 85,000-mile relay from Athens to Beijing, it runs into demonstrators protesting China’s occupation of Tibet and its role in the genocide in Darfur. In London, thirty-five demonstrators were arrested by the police after numerous clashes, and in Paris, the Olympic flame was extinguished five times before those carrying it canceled their relay run.

A similar set of events took place in San Francisco, the Olympic torch’s one stop in America. The day before the torch arrived activists unfurled “Free Tibet” banners on... More

What's in a Name?

Juliet believed that “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Perhaps this is true, but that other name would not warn her that the flower’s stem also has thorns. Names matter; no more so than when they sharply distinguish Us from Them—Montagues from Capulets, white Americans from black Americans. The latter are now conventionally referred to in public speech and polite private conversations as African-Americans. 

It has become preferred usage because it is, relative to other historic common us... More

Olympic Test: U.S. Basketball and Foreign Policy

With the N.B.A. Finals just beginning, it’s a great time in the United States to be a basketball fan. But the real test for American basketball fans won’t come until this August, when the U.S. men’s team makes its appearance at the Beijing Olympics.

Once upon a time, America had a lock on Olympic basketball gold. Basketball was the game that America invented and by the 1980s, it had become its cities’ most popular game with African-American players making up 75 percent of the N.B.A.’s rosters. But by 2002, Am... More

Hezbollah and the Future of Lebanon

The 18-month political gridlock in Lebanon has come to a happy end with the Hezbollah-led opposition and the pro-Western governing coalition reaching an agreement in Doha, Qatar. Both camps stepped back from the brink of all-out civil war and agreed to elect General Michel Suleiman, the commander of Lebanese Armed Forces, as president of Lebanon, and form a cabinet in which Hezbollah will be able to exercise veto power over pivotal domestic and foreign policy decisions.
Last Sunday Lebanon’s parlia... More

After Kentucky: What Obama's Loss Means

As a result of Tuesday’s Democratic primaries in Oregon and Kentucky, Barack Obama now has enough pledged delegates to claim, as he did in Iowa, that he is “within reach” of the Democratic party’s presidential nomination.

But Clinton’s better than two-to-one route of Obama in Kentucky leaves his campaign with plenty to worry about.  Although in Oregon Obama scored his first victory among white voters since Vermont, his lopsided loss in Kentucky reflected the kind of difficulty he has had in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Clinton won the support of white voters in Kentu... More