Fighting Poverty With Virtue: Moral Reform and America’s Urban Poor 1825-2000 by Joel Schwartz Indiana University Press, 2000, 480 pp., $39.95 Conservatives for some time now have been urging a return to virtue and morality as a key to resolving …
This is a big Dissent, partly because we are planning a special issue for Winter and could not hold articles over, partly because of an embarrassment of riches. Editors dream about this; I can’t explain it, nor can I do …
Across the street from the compound where Slobodan Milosevic barricaded himself against police last winter before being carted off to jail sits a beautiful villa once inhabited by Marshal Tito. This same villa, with its manicured gardens and freshly painted …
Liza Featherstone argues that United Students Against Sweatshops activists are active in other anticapitalist efforts symbolized by “Seattle,” that their anticapitalist framework furnishes them with inspiration and vision, and that their radicalism has thus empowered them. These are good points. …
This is a time to speak quietly and act carefully…firmly, inventively, boldly, but above all carefully. With all Americans, with decent people the world over, we mourn the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. …
Blindness by José Saramago, translated by Giovanni Pontiero Harcourt Brace, 1998 293 pp $22 All the Names by José Saramago, translated by Margaret Jull Costa Harcourt Brace, 2000 238 pp $24 The twentieth century was the era of …
A Proposal for Modesty
The term “anti-globalization movement” (AGM) has come to refer to recent mass protests against global capitalist expansion. Much of the public, and even participants in the movement itself, have uncritically accepted the label. But the naming of something gives power …
What if education were available without tuition charges to every resident meeting admissions criteria, as a right, at any public, post secondary educational institution in the United States? Is this idea feasible? Is there potential public support for it? What …
Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein Hill and Wang, 2001, 671 pp., $30 No political movement in America these last twenty-five years has rivaled conservatism in appeal or influence. Everywhere one …
The Case of Open Source
By the time this is published, Congress likely will have mandated a massive increase in state standardized testing and threatened harsh sanctions on schools that fail to make “adequate yearly progress” in raising test scores. The consequences for children, educators, …
Whenever I speak to a group about education issues, I begin with a quick straw poll that asks, Do you think your grandparents got a better education than their parents? Your parents a better education than their parents? You a …
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in Boom-Time America by Barbara Ehrenreich Metropolitan Books, 2001, 256 pp., $23 White-Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and its Rewards in Corporate America by Jill Andresky Fraser W.W. Norton & Company, 2001 …
As a journalist who has written—and thought—a great deal about the student antisweatshop movement, I agree with Jeffrey C. Isaac that United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) has done an excellent job of achieving modest yet significant reformist victories. I agree, …
