A few months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Michael Walzer wrote an article for Dissent, “Can There Be a Decent Left?,” which made a number of American leftists rather mad. In it, Michael reproached those who saw the …
One night last fall, eating my dinner somewhat hastily between an afternoon meeting and an evening meeting, I picked up the latest issue of Dissent (Winter 2013), opened it at random, and began reading. Immediately my feeling of being rushed …
Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed: The MSF Experience by Claire Magone, Michael Neuman, and Fabrice Weissman, eds. Columbia University Press, 2011, 250 pp. On March 19, 2011, French and British forces, with the military support of the United States, launched a massive …
From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia by Pankaj Mishra Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012, 356 pp. Pankaj Mishra asks good questions. As he has ascended from posh-poor Brahmin in provincial India, to New York Review of …
The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death by Jill Lepore Knopf, 2012, 304 pp. The Story of America: Essays on Origins by Jill Lepore Princeton University Press, 2012, 420 pp. In high school, Jill Lepore—now an Americanist …
The Right and Labor in America: Politics, Ideology, and Imagination Nelson Lichtenstein and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, eds. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012, 432 pp. As the overall unionization rate in the United States dips ever closer to single digits, the …
Dissent is a magazine for people who worry. So here is something to worry about, highlighted by Barack Obama’s inaugural address. I am certainly glad that it was his inauguration, but what he said or, better, didn’t say, illustrates one …
When Irving Howe died suddenly, in May 1993, no one was sure whether Dissent would keep going. The magazine’s young-ish editors and writers wanted to see it continue, but we all felt that it would thrive only if Michael Walzer …
Now that I am about to become an ordinary Dissentnik, I want to describe how that happened once before—in 1954, when I held the first issue of the magazine in my hands. I grew up in the Popular Front, reading …
Governing the World: The History of an Idea by Mark Mazower Penguin, 2012, 416 pp. “La tot’ homoze in familje konunigare so debá,” sang Ludwig Zamenhof in 1877, in celebration of his nineteenth birthday. The language of the song, Esperanto, …
Is there a difference between a liberal and a social democrat that amounts to a distinction? If there is, is it a distinction with merit? Michael Walzer is a social democrat; it is an honorary badge. For a long time, …
Jeffrey Wasserstrom introduces a special section on China in the Spring 2013 issue: “Wherever this protean country moves next, it will be taken there not just by people whose names are widely known but by those whose dreams, desires, aspirations, and actions make up China’s 99 percent.”
A “flexible” corporation requires flexible workers, and as the labor market has shifted, so have the conditions placed on its participants. Flexibility doesn’t just manifest itself in global economic trends. It has now become a central part of the office worker’s performance.
Many municipal parks agencies have become charity cases, overly dependent upon support from conservancies and “Friends” groups in order to fulfill their missions. Some of the most glaring inequities in the United States are becoming manifest in the way our public spaces are designed, maintained, and regulated.
I drew the line at publicly aligning myself with “the abortion issue,” Roe v. Wade, and the institutional white feminists popularly associated with the ruling. Doing so seemed like socio-political suicide in my highly segregated, decidedly African American slice of Philadelphia community life.
