The Year at Dissent
The Year at Dissent
Looking back at some of our best and most-read pieces in 2019.
We wanted to share some highlights from Dissent in 2019.
Our special sections focused on the Latin American left, the labor movement, nationalism, and the rural United States. We covered democratic uprisings in Hong Kong and Puerto Rico, and right-wing reversals in Brazil, India, and Bolivia. We took on the failings of the media in “Trump Country,” and its shortcomings in representing (and employing) working-class people. We reconsidered the ideas of thinkers like Kwame Nkrumah, Nicos Poulantzas, Barbara Ehrenreich, Bruno Latour, and Jean-Claude Michéa. We explored Black Lives Matter five years in, the politics of indigenous resistance, the critical juncture for reproductive justice, how debtors have organized in the United States, and the debate over reparations for the descendants of slaves.
We asked about what comes after extractive economic models, and what politics look like as the frontier closes in. In Culture Front, we examined the Twitter novel, the radicalism of Ursula K. Le Guin, the legacy of Gen X, the liberal optimism of Parks and Recreation, the personhood of elephants, the literature of Amos Oz, and the politics of reenacting historical trauma. Belabored, our labor podcast hosted by Sarah Jaffe and Michelle Chen, continued strong (listen to their 2019 round-up here), and we partnered with Know Your Enemy, a new podcast on the right hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell. And we mourned the loss of three members of our editorial board: Ann Snitow, Agnes Heller, and Martin Kilson.
That’s just a small selection of the hundreds of essays and articles published at Dissent this year. You can subscribe or donate to support the work we do into 2020 and beyond.
Here are our most read pieces this year:
- “The Obamanauts” by Corey Robin
- “Already Great: On Parks and Rec” by Timothy Shenk
- “Hong Kong’s Fight for Life” by Wilfred Chan
- “Ursula K. Le Guin’s Revolutions” by Sarah Jones
- “Remembering Erik Olin Wright” by Adam Szetela
- “On the Origins of the Professional-Managerial Class: An Interview with Barbara Ehrenreich” by Alex Press
- “Ayn Rand and the Cruel Heart of Neoliberalism” by Lisa Duggan
- “What Men Want: On Andrea Dworkin” by Charlotte Shane
- “Right Privilege: Conservatism in the Trump Era” by Timothy Shenk
- “The New Psychoanalysis” by Stephen Seligman
- “Daniel Bell at 100” by David A. Bell
- “Pop-Up Populism: The Failure of Left-Wing Nationalism in Germany” by Quinn Slobodian and William Callison
- “The European Far Right’s Environmental Turn” by Kate Aronoff
- “Can Conservatives Write Good U.S. History?” by Michael Kazin
- “What’s Left of Generation X” by Kim Phillips-Fein
- “Nicos Poulantzas: Philosopher of Democratic Socialism” by David Sessions
- “Why We Need a Working-Class Media” by Carla Murphy
- “The Postcolonial Case for Rethinking Borders” by E. Tendayi Achiume
- “Material World: On Bruno Latour” by Alyssa Battistoni
- “The Christchurch Massacre and the White Power Movement” by Kathleen Belew
- “Hurrah for the Time Man!” by Gabriel Winant
