Spring 2025

Prophetic Encounters: Religion and the American Radical Tradition by Dan McKanan

“When I graduated from Muncie Central High School, you could go just about anyplace and get a job—a decent job,” says Dennis Tyler. Tyler has represented Muncie’s Delaware County in the Indiana State House since 2007, and this past November …

Editors: Joan Ockman’s lively review of several famous buildings and architects (“What Is Democratic Architecture?” Dissent, Fall 2011) asks what determines democratic architecture and answers that she is “suspicious of democracy talk in architecture.” I would go one step further …

It’s hard to forget Donovon. He sat in the far right corner of his sixth-grade math classroom facing the wall. He was quiet and listened to the teacher’s class discussions and lectures, even though he could not actually see her …

For at least two decades, conservatives have argued that school choice was the last unachieved civil right. In 2010, some powerful moderate voices echoed their view and invoked the name of Rosa Parks to support it. At one screening of …

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class by Guy Standing

I’m in the receiving line with my mother at my aunt’s wake. The stifling funeral parlor is crowded with mourners, and I recognize former neighbors from my aunt’s all-Italian neighborhood. My mother tenses as an elderly man approaches, murmurs his …

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson Random House, 2010, 640 pp. In the year or so before Woodrow Wilson’s administration took the United States into the Great War raging in Europe, …

How to Change the World by Eric Hobsbawm Yale University Press, 2011, 480 pp. Eric Hobsbawm is one of the great historians of the past century. His books and essays are beautifully written, full of stimulating insights, and able to …

The End of Energy: The Unmaking of America’s Environment, Security, and Independence by Michael J. Graetz MIT Press, 2011, 384 pp. Michael J. Graetz’s The End of Energy is a well-documented lamentation over the forty-year failure of the U.S. political …

For over a century, liberals and radicals have seen the possibility of change in capitalist systems from one of two perspectives: the reform tradition assumes that corporate institutions remain central to the system but believes that regulatory policies can contain, …