Fall 2020

There are two Edward Saids. One is a literary scholar and critic, cultivated, knowledgeable, and, notwithstanding his interest in the literature of the third world, a traditionalist in taste. The other is a spokesman for the Palestinian cause and adherent …

Daughter of a prominent Bolshevik intellectual, Anna Larina was twenty years old when she married the forty-five-year-old Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin in 1935. As a little girl delighted by Bukharin’s playfulness and charm, she had looked forward to his visits …

When Michael Harrington’s The Other America began to win a large audience after its publication in 1962, both he and his friends were very much surprised. I remember thinking that Mike’s book, fine as it was, would probably be numbered …

We live in a time of diminished expectations. It’s not exactly a time of conservative dominance, although the dominant politics in some countries is an unenthusiastic conservatism. Nor is it a time of liberal dominance, although in the United States …

I voted for Clinton, I was glad he won—if only because his victory brought to an end twelve dreary years of right-wing domination. Whatever our hopes or expectations, large or modest, regarding the near future, we know at least that …

This is a moment for questions. Probably the ones we ask ourselves are not very different from those our readers would ask. So here’s an effort by one Dissent editor to provide, not exhaustive or definitive, but brief and provisional …

Social decline? Social decay? Social breakdown? We wondered which of these phrases, none of them “scientific” in nature, would best apply to the current situation in the United States. Social decline—too mild. Social decay—that suggests a process too slow. Social …