The rise of a genuinely left Confucianism in China would be a welcome development, but Dan Bell’s account of what this doctrine might look like, and how it is invoked by contemporary “new leftists,” leaves me unpersuaded that it could …
“I am human and I consider nothing human alien to me”: this statement has always struck me as preposterous. Of course there are human creations and activities that are alienating, or worse. (The famous sentence in Terence’s comedy is in …
What relationship American intellectuals should have toward mass culture—television, films, mass-market books, popular music, and the Internet—will vary as much as the people themselves. I think that it’s good if there are some intellectuals who get deeply involved with these …
In 1989, I strongly supported the student-led pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. Without knowing much about China, I guess I supported the students partly out of a form of self-love; it seemed they wanted to follow my social and political …
I don’t know if my mother intended to die on Valentine’s Day. But she did. At nearly ninety-six and a half, Beatrice Katz had reached one of her goals, outliving her oldest sister by a few months. Her hospice nurse, …
From the start of the current economic crisis, commentators have compared the ongoing unpleasantness to the crash of 1929, with the implication that we might soon begin to suffer a version of the Great Depression if we did not avoid …
Some questions are really not worth asking, even as they nag. What relationship should American intellectuals have toward mass culture: television, films, mass-market books, popular music, and the Internet may be one of them. Before answering it, let me first …
Spoiler alert: This piece gives away key plot details about Inglourious Basterds. Quentin Tarantino’s Second World War adventure, like Bonnie and Clyde, is a distillation of the movies, tall tales, and shared legends that color our view of the past. …
Last fall, we invited a number of prominent American intellectuals who are not editors of Dissent to participate in a forum about the culture and politics of our country. It seems a good time for such a discussion. Both U.S. …
Coming of age during the Vietnam War, I cut my cultural teeth on an exalted idea of intellectuals. They were the people who challenged the official pieties, especially the easy equation of power and virtue, the American civil religion that …
The online journal Democratiya launched in 2005. Sixteen issues, one book, and a quarter-million readers later, Democratiya is being incorporated into Dissent. Why? Well, when Dwight Macdonald closed Politics, his “one-man magazine,” in 1949, he cited the relentless demands of …
Communism has lost its capacity to inspire the Chinese. But what will replace it? And what should replace it? Clearly, there is a need for a new moral foundation for political rule in China, and the government has moved closer …
The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience by Kirstin Downey Random House, 2009, 480 pp. $35 As the nation debates once again proposals to guarantee health insurance for …
One of the questions that we posed for the forum on intellectuals and their America in this issue has preoccupied me for many years, and I will seize this occasion to respond (other editors may also join the conversation on …
Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression by Morris Dickstein Norton, 2009, 598 pp., $29.95 Need it be said we live in gloomy times? The most optimistic among our commentariat talk of a jobless recovery: the …
