Spring 2025

The graffito made famous by American GIs as a marker of place, of having been somewhere, stands rewritten as the name for a travel agency on Zellescher Weg in Dresden: “Kilroy Travels.” This phrase, printed in English over a stylized …

Colin Powell, George W. Bush’s bedazzling secretary of state, emphasized the importance in his Senate confirmation hearings of tightening ties between trade and national security. There is a need, he asserted, for better coordination of American foreign economic and military …

Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert Putnam Simon & Schuster, 2000, 544 pp.   Tucked away on a shelf in my parents’ home is a trophy honoring their achievements in the Knights of Pythias bowling …

America is a secular society nervous with its secularism. Since the nation’s founding, that nervousness has manifest itself in periodic redrawing of the boundary between church and state and in practices that compromise the “wall of separation.” Today, however, the …

C. Wright Mills, Letters and Autobiographical Writings ed. Kathryn Mills with Pamela Mills, introduction by Dan Wakefield University of California Press, 2000, 378 pp., $34.95   In the nineteen fifties and early sixties, C. Wright Mills cut a wide swath …

Global trade advocates hope that the new information technologies (ITs) will deliver immense benefits, especially for those who control these technologies. But as potent as they may be as profit-seeking tools, information technologies are (at least for the time being) …

“When the legend becomes fact,” says Edmond O’Brien in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “print the legend.” The process of printing the legend about the 2000 presidential election has now been well under way for some time; …

We devote this issue almost entirely to American politics, looking back to the disputed presidential election and forward to the administration of Bush II. The mix of articles is incomplete; we can’t cover everything at once. But the pieces add …

The California power crisis has made it clear to all but the most theory-besotted ideologues that “trusting the market” does not automatically solve economic problems. This comes as news to few readers of Dissent, but what went wrong is worth …

Imagine a corporate executive who’s been convicted of embezzlement. He serves his sentence and some years later, having paid his debt to society, leaves prison a free man. Now he’s an ex-convict, in fact, an ex-felon. Should we allow him …

It’s a sultry July morning; I am sitting on a low wall outside a three-story brownstone on West 120th Street, a stone’s throw away from Mount Morris Park, in Harlem. Four workmen, covered in dust and dirt, are coming and …

The year 2000 was the worst for the U.S. stock market in nearly two decades—but not for weapons makers. The share prices of the two biggest military contractors, Lockheed Martin and Boeing, hit new highs, while the Standard & Poor’s …

The River District was known as the place to go for dinner. Within a compact area of about six blocks were dozens of excellent restaurants of every variety. Most people would just park on the street and walk around, looking …