Family Portrait
Mom Relaxing My Hair, 2005, by LaToya Ruby Frazier. © LaToya Ruby Frazier. At first, you might feel you are intruding. This is a private moment. A mother helping her daughter prepare for the outside world. On the table, tools …
Winter 2025
- Subscribe
- Magazine
- Online
- Blog
- Podcasts
- Events
- Store
- Logout
- About Us
- Donate
- Contact
- Advertise
- Newsletter
Statelessness: A Forgotten Crisis 
The Nubian community has lived in Kenya for over a hundred years, yet many became stateless after Kenya’s independence in 1963. For years, Nubian youth had to go through a nationality verification process called “vetting” in order to obtain a …
Britain’s London Problem
June 24 On June 23 the UK voted to leave the European Union after thirty years of a halting, sometimes noble, often messy experiment in international cooperation. In my circles—professional, well-educated, Cambridge and London—the principal reaction was incredulity. How could …
A Radical History of Free Speech
With the rhetoric of free speech increasingly captured by the right, a new book tells the story of the radicals who first championed freedom of expression as a substantive political right.
Booked: Learning How to Be a Black Man in America, with Mychal Denzel Smith
An interview with Mychal Denzel Smith about his book, Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching, and why the language of universalism is not going to solve all of our problems.
Summer 2016
To access Dissent’s full Summer issue, please click here. This page is a placeholder.
Stuck in a Gilded Age
The U.S. economy has changed a lot since the 1970s—let alone the 1870s. But we are still stuck with old concepts for assessing it, and politics to match.
The Politics of Refugee Relief
As aid groups struggle to provide even basic services, refugees have turned to overt and contentious modes of resistance to shape their own lives. What do these protests tell us about our existing system of humanitarian response?
After Irony
Can affect theory help us understand our contemporary unease—and express our dreams for the future—without becoming a stand-in for the slow, hard work of politics?
How War Lost Its Politics
Election years used to be occasions for pitched battles over whether to go to war. Why aren’t they still?
Kashmir Stories
At once Bildungsroman and sprawling history, Malik Sajad’s Munnu tells the story of Kashmir through the eyes of a boy and his violent, insular, emboxed world.
The Violence of Eviction
To understand how the housing market really works, we need to hear the stories of those who have been pushed out. Two essential new books shine a spotlight on those stories, and illuminate much more in the process.
Syria’s Displaced: A Photo Essay
Za’atari refugee camp houses some 80,000 residents, making it one of the largest cities in Jordan. Views from inside the wall.
Into the Institutions
The left neglects the institutional structures of democracy at its own peril. In his latest book, political theorist Jeremy Waldron offers a welcome corrective.
Racial Politics After Obama
Far from heralding a “post-racial” era, the Age of Obama has fostered an intense racialization of U.S. politics and an eruption of agonistic identity politics across partisan lines. These challenges will be among the most vital of the post–Obama era, for both black politics and the resurgent American left.
