Winter 2016
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Winter 2016 – Mobile Editions 
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Country Music Capital
When Nashville was anointed the capital of country music, a true American icon was born.
Camus on Trial
Kamel Daoud’s Meursault, contre-enquête is complex and irreverent, scorning both colonialism and Eurocentrism as well as postcolonial dreams of national liberation and clerical authority.
Back to the Future
Pulsating with racial and national anxieties, cyberpunk icon William Gibson’s future America is not so different from the one we know.
The Two Lefts of Jorge Castañeda
Can the Latin American left really be divided into a moderate, social democratic “right left” and an authoritarian, populist “wrong” one?
Innovation for What? The Politics of Inequality in Higher Education
Today’s embrace of “innovation” in higher ed advances the interests of the business elite over those of educators or students.
The Care Gap
While childcare costs have soared, wages in the industry have stayed flat—leaving nearly half of childcare workers dependent on public benefits to survive. Why is the labor of educating children worth so little?
Choosing War
By reframing war in terms of “moral injury,” philosopher Nancy Sherman dodges the question of who is responsible for its horrors in the first place.
The Right vs. The Family
Despite the right’s appeals to “family values,” free-market policies are extremely destructive to American families.
Socialism in America
If Bernie Sanders’s presidential run is to herald a new socialist movement, American leftists will have to overcome the combination of sectarianism, repression, and cooptation that doomed their predecessors.
From Sweden to Socialism: A Small Symposium on Big Questions
What’s the difference between socialism and social democracy? In 1991, Dissent convened several longtime contributors to answer that question, somewhat rephrased: what would distinguish socialism from a slightly improved version of Sweden?
A Book as Big as Life
City on Fire—Garth Risk Hallberg’s massive and elaborately constructed novel about New York in the 1970s—offers the contours of the great social novel. But it struggles to reveal the ways in which power actually works.
A Lost Boy in Louisville: One Refugee’s Story
In 1986, Deng Manyoun left his southern Sudan town to escape civil war and famine. Nineteen years later, he was shot dead by a white police officer in Louisville, Kentucky. Manyoun’s story illustrates not just the alarming scale of U.S. police violence but the dramatic failure of our refugee resettlement policy.
Who Pays Writers?
At its height, the American welfare state provided direct financial support to scores of writers. They used it to challenge the political status quo, revolutionizing literary form in the process.
