How should democratic socialists think about the family and its role in modern society? The essential problem is to find alternatives to individualist and marketized conceptions of social life. Solutions to this problem are most commonly sought in the political …
I love Marshall Berman’s notion of jaytalking. It reminds me of Ms. Frizzle, in the Magic School Bus series, telling her kids, “Take chances, make mistakes, get messy.” It’s exactly the opposite of the push in today’s culture, to “get …
A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone, Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster by Ted Morgan Random House, 1999, 402 pp., $29.95 American labor has played a central role in U.S. foreign policy over the past six decades. Yet because of the difficulties in …
Mark Levinson One of the most important people to this magazine, Simone Plastrik, never appeared in its pages as a writer. In fact, when I think about Dissent, I think about Simone. This is not only because of the role …
I had always been sympathetic toward the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Southern Poverty Law Center. As a Jew whose father’s family had been murdered during the Holocaust, and as someone on “the left” for whom the civil rights movement …
The end of the century, out of convenience or convention, because of nostalgia for the past or apprehension of the future, encourages the drawing up of balance sheets. This is especially so concerning communism, which played such a dominant role …
Juneteenth by Ralph Ellison, edited by John F. Callahan Random House, 1999, 384 pp., $25 Ralph Ellison’s posthumous novel, Juneteenth, has become a book mired in charges of betrayal, and its editor, John Callahan, has been hounded for overseeing the …
Ten years ago I was quite unsure as to what would happen in the communist bloc. I certainly did not predict how vast the transformation would be. I did believe that it was a moment of contingencies and possibilities. I …
Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, American Modernity by Micaela di Leonardo University of Chicago Press, 1998, 272 pp., $35 This book addresses an important problem: the place of anthropology in America’s public culture. Micaela di Leonardo, professor of anthropology and …
Bertrand Russell was not the most successful of political prophets. If he had not died almost thirty years ago of extreme old age, he would surely have been astonished to see that humanity has not yet blown itself to bits. …
What were my expectations for Eastern and Central Europe ten years ago? I did have my hopes. They were vast. I was hoping, a little wistfully, to see a new kind of society arise—a society with socialist values and libertarian …
No social movement can thrive without the energy of the emerging generation, and from this perspective the Columbine High School shooting was awful in more than the obvious way. Amid the anguish, indignation, hysteria, and political posturing that followed the …
Don’t Think, Smile: Notes on a Decade of Denial by Ellen Willis Beacon Press, 192 pp., $24 For thirty years, in a wide arc from the Village Voice and Social Text to the New Yorker and Mirabella, Ellen Willis has …
New York is a place of surfeits and shortages. Of office space, we have too much; of plain old space, too little. Of fileted fresh lobster meat, at $35 a pound, there is much too much; of basic foodstuffs for …
If I told you I was born into the O’Brien family in Chicago in 1941, that my father was an ardent union member, that both my parents were staunch Catholics, that we lived in a two-flat owned by my uncle …
