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Climate Change: Connecting the Dots  

Sometimes pictures tell the story best. Last year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change complied and published the results of several studies on renewable energy. The good news is that there is tremendous potential for the use of renewable forms …



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The Curious Case of Mitt and the Apartment  

Brian Beutler at Talking Points Memo notices something odd in Mitt Romney’s health insurance rhetoric. The uninsured, in Romney’s world, always live in apartments. “We don’t have people who become ill, who die in their apartment because they don’t have …



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A New Era for Wal-Mart Workers?  

There is no such thing as a spontaneous strike, protest, or any other kind of social irruption. Spontaneity is just another word for ignorance on the part of those in power who are the object of subaltern scorn and protest.



Israeli Counter-Intellectuals Take Aim at Academic Freedom  

Here is one more thing in which Israel is imitating America: neocon tactics. American neocons think that American universities are overwhelmingly liberal, and so they have created alternatives in the form of think tanks designed to foster conservative thought. This, …





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Eric Hobsbawm and the Limits of Marxism  

While Hobsbawm will be remembered as a historian of singular gifts, his writings already seem less a harbinger of the shape of things to come than sterling examples of an older kind of scholarship at its best.



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Eugene Genovese and Dissent  

Eugene D. Genovese, one of the foremost left-wing scholars of his time, has died. A teenage member of the Communist Party kicked out for “having zigged when I was supposed to zag,” he gained national notoriety in 1965 for welcoming “the impending Viet Cong victory” at a Rutgers teach-in.







The Politics of Provocation  

An earlier version of this ran at openDemocracy last week, before tens of thousands marched in Benghazi to demand the dissolution of Islamist militias—a demand soon supported by the Libyan government. The plot line could have leapt from the baroque …







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Web Letter: Timothy Messer-Kruse Responds to Thai Jones  

Thai Jones, clearly discomforted by what my book is—essentially an ideological genealogy of a particular strain of revolutionary anarchism that flared into popularity in the 1880s and died in America with the explosion of the Haymarket bomb—employs the age-old dodge …



Horst Brand, 1919–2012  

Horst Brand, a longtime editor and contributing editor of Dissent, died on August 25. At the time of his death, he was at work on what would have been his fifty-seventh article for Dissent. His first article appeared in our …