What were my expectations for Eastern and Central Europe ten years ago? I did have my hopes. They were vast. I was hoping, a little wistfully, to see a new kind of society arise—a society with socialist values and libertarian …
Don’t Think, Smile: Notes on a Decade of Denial by Ellen Willis Beacon Press, 192 pp., $24 For thirty years, in a wide arc from the Village Voice and Social Text to the New Yorker and Mirabella, Ellen Willis has …
No social movement can thrive without the energy of the emerging generation, and from this perspective the Columbine High School shooting was awful in more than the obvious way. Amid the anguish, indignation, hysteria, and political posturing that followed the …
New York is a place of surfeits and shortages. Of office space, we have too much; of plain old space, too little. Of fileted fresh lobster meat, at $35 a pound, there is much too much; of basic foodstuffs for …
If I told you I was born into the O’Brien family in Chicago in 1941, that my father was an ardent union member, that both my parents were staunch Catholics, that we lived in a two-flat owned by my uncle …
Any great social change unleashes great expectations. And therefore, of course, it leads to great disappointments. In 1989, a variety of individuals and social groups pinned their varied hopes to a change of political systems. For some it meant the …
I firmly believe that even Israelis who voted for Benjamin Natanyahu were re-lieved by Ehud Barak’s victory last May 17. It was as if the whole country had been in a state of anxiety and depression, and now its mood …
The defendant, sitting in a bulletproofed glass box, rambled on about the historic closeness of Turks and Kurds and the need to recognize Turkey’s vibrant, if somewhat flawed, democracy. His lawyers said little—their request to call witnesses was denied by …
In 1989, my life was coming apart, and there wasn’t a thing I could do. It was hard to get through the day, and even harder to make it through the night. That year I really loved my TV set. …
Figures emerge from the thick of it. That is what I see in David Stern’s art—and that is why I think of him as a painter not just for the end of the twentieth century, but for the beginning of …
Nineteen ninety nine was a tough year to be a college-bound high school senior. College admissions were more competitive than ever. “It’s kind of a college mania, with suburban schools sending 70 percent to 80 percent of their students to …
The ways societies view children have changed a great deal over the genera-tions. Authoritarian societies tend to see minors as adults in all ways other than in their small stature. These societies presume that children assume responsibility for their acts. …
Elshtain and Etzioni respond to my ar-gument for minors’ First Amendment rights with the same highly charged rhetorical devices that have brought our culture to its current state of hysteria over the need to “protect” youth from presumably harmful speech. …
The recent publication of two biographies of Betty Friedan, and the media attention the books have drawn, make this an apt moment to reflect on the myths about the women’s movement that some on the political left as well as …
I met Joe Wood in 1992, after mutual friends suggested that I might ask him to write for Dissent. I remember liking him immediately. He was an interesting mix: he was blunt, almost fierce, in his opinions, yet in his …
