Spring 2025

Watching the History Channel

As we go to press, a great American city is being destroyed; tens of thousands of its inhabitants are in desperate straits. What happened in New Orleans at the end of August should prompt an urgent reconsideration of homeland security. …

Thomas L. Friedman’s The World Is Flat

In Truro, Massachusetts, at the end of 2004, police politely asked all male residents to provide a DNA sample to match with DNA material found at the scene of an unsolved murder. Residents were approached in a non-threatening manner and …

Arthur Miller’s death this spring brought back his great moment half a century ago, when he defied the foul fiend. At his House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearing in June 1956, he tried to explain himself; all they wanted was …

The Spring 2005 issue of Dissent featured a forceful article by Mark Tushnet, “Democracy versus Judicial Review,” which proposed an End Judicial Review Amendment (EJRA) to the U.S. Constitution. It would read, “Except as authorized by Congress, no court of …

The politics of George W. Bush, unlike earlier American conservatisms, is animated by ideas and not merely by interests. That is, at least, what Bush’s friends assert, and what his foes usually concede. But is it so? The ideas in …

How Environmentalism Can Regain Lost Ground

Reflections on Kurds and Palestinians

A growing number of social scientists fear that marriage may be on the rocks and few doubt that matrimony, as we have known it, has undergone a wrenching period of change in the past several decades. Andrew Cherlin, a leading …

Jonathan Cook on Suzana Sawyer’s Crude Chronicles

Three years ago, Jay Hammond figured his time was nearly up. At least he’d led a full life: Marine Corps fighter pilot in the Second World War; bush pilot in Alaska; master hunter and fisher with the U.S. Fish and …

Central Park is in full bloom as I write this; the orange Gates that lit up the park in the gloom of February are a faint after-image. The grand achievement of Christo and Jeanne Claude is overshadowed by the changing …

Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays by Christopher Hitchens Nation Books, 2004, 475 pp., $16.95 Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, an unsettling matter has roiled certain precincts of the left: Christopher Hitchens’s zealous support of the Bush …