History has issued a definitive verdict on the events of October 2, 1968, in the capital city of Mexico, at least for its horrendous moral significance. Although we will never know the exact number of those killed on that afternoon …
Charles Dickens, at the start of A Tale of Two Cities, his novel of the French Revolution, portrays 1789 as a magical year that crystallized “the best of times” and “the worst of times” within itself. Living through 1968 in …
At an SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) conference held in the spring of 1967, Abbie Hoffman, Paul Krassner, and the San Francisco hippie group “the Diggers” burst into the middle of Tom Hayden’s keynote speech, screaming that the people …
Larry Hardesty is correct about “Norwegian Wood,” and I apologize for the error. But I believe my general argument still holds. Hardesty’s analysis either parallels or is derived from Wilfrid Mellers’s analysis of “Norwegian Wood” in his 1973 book, The …
Dissent’s editors asked a number of leading writers and intellectuals of the left to respond to the following questions: “Nineteen sixty-eight was one of the most tumultuous years in the history of the modern left. In this, its fortieth-anniversary year, …
It’s tempting to view 1968 in the United States and Western Europe as a repetition of 1848—and, contrary to Marx’s axiom, one fully as tragic the second time around. In both years, radical movements mainly of the young made daring, …
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army Jeremy Scahill Nation Books, 2007 464 pp $26.95 Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry P.W. Singer Cornell University Press, 2007 (first edition, …
IN THE EVER-EVOLVING and convoluted story of affirmative action in the United States, June 28, 2007 will stand out as a paradox. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority managed in one ruling to undermine racial integration in primary and secondary education …
Nineteen sixty-eight was a formative year for a generation of the left. Later, some observers (and participants) of philosophical bent thought to capture “the events” in a comment made long before by Hegel. After seeing Napoleon enter town following the …
Norman Mailer came to public attention as the young author of a best-selling novel of 1948, The Naked and the Dead. It quickly became one of three war novels by Americans that any reader of that generation was likely to …
We are in the middle of the most politically gripping Democratic primary campaign in recent memory, and, with a lead time of almost two months, there is nothing that we can say about it that will be readable or relevant …
On George Konrád’s A Guest in My Own Country and The City Builder.
Daniel A. Bell engages in the timely and worthy task of looking at an important social issue in East Asia—the employment of domestic workers—from a Confucian perspective. In Hong Kong, for example, live-in foreign domestic helpers (most domestic helpers in …
Alexis de Tocqueville was so impressed with American jurisprudence that he called jury duty a free school for learning personal rights and practical law. But for decades being summoned to jury duty taught me different lessons—how to game the system …
I have never served on a jury, but I have been a potential juror, waiting in the basement of the Trenton courthouse with many others. Four or five times I was called to sit there, for a couple of days …
