More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City by William Julius Wilson W.W. Norton, 2009, 190 pp., $24.95 The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today by Andrew J. Cherlin Knopf, 2009, …
I will begin with a general comment, then discuss the specific points raised by Michael B. Katz and Mark J. Stern. There is a great deal of public anxiety about the dramatic family changes of the past several decades, and …
Kay Trimberger and I are not far apart politically. We share a feminist perspective. We agree that “irreversible changes” have occurred to marriage and family life, and we agree that family change does not equate to moral decay. We agree …
Marriage entered presidential politics for the first time as farce: Dan Quayle’s June 1992 attack on the television character “Murphy Brown” for having a child while unmarried. In the wake of the Los Angeles riots, the then-vice president addressed the …
Recently, a PBS Frontline documentary called “The New Asylum” showed how our jails and prisons have become, by default, the nation’s mental hospitals. This wasn’t an exposé. The prison under examination didn’t seem particularly bad. The staff seemed to be …
The post-election stress disorder afflicting Blue Americans (wherever we live) continues four months after the election. We still obsess about what went wrong. Was gay marriage the determining factor? Moral values in general? Was it the threat of terrorism? Did …
As this issue of Dissent goes to press in late November, almost everyone from the center-left outward remains in various states of shock, disbelief, and depression about the election results. This series on rethinking the cultural war over the family …
After September 11, 2001, Dissent published a series of articles that critically assessed traditional left ideas about America and its place in the world. For some time, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein and I have been thinking about undertaking a similar review …
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