Photo Essay: Consuming China
Despite being the “world’s manufacturer,” China has been moving toward a consumption-led economy. In this photo essay, Tong Lam looks at the consumer products and information that saturate everyday life in China.
Winter 2025
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Women’s Rights at Risk
A combination of factors in recent years has contributed to a fall in the status and material well-being of Chinese women relative to men.
Land of Many Nationalisms
Increasingly, residents of the Chinese mainland, especially the middle-class urbanites who regularly go online, seek answers to questions like: Is it possible to be a Chinese patriot, while acknowledging one’s unhappiness with the status quo?
Guest Workers As Bellwether
Guest workers are too often invisible in popular discussions of work; when they appear, it’s as outliers. But Saket Soni, who founded the National Guestworker Alliance amid the New Orleans’s post-Katrina guest worker influx, says they’re better understood as a bellwether.
Open Letter to the Parties: Time for the Neo-Dissidents
No liberal democracy, political party, market economy, or human right is set in stone. People created these concepts, and people have the power to destroy them. These social constructs are often elevated to the rank of universal laws or endowed …
Between Dignity and Human Rights 
Books and Articles Discussed in this Essay: Dignity: Its History and Meaning, by Michael Rosen (Harvard University Press, 2012) A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, by Mary Ann Glendon (New York: Random House, …
A Decent Leftist
A few months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Michael Walzer wrote an article for Dissent, “Can There Be a Decent Left?,” which made a number of American leftists rather mad. In it, Michael reproached those who saw the …
The Mensch
One night last fall, eating my dinner somewhat hastily between an afternoon meeting and an evening meeting, I picked up the latest issue of Dissent (Winter 2013), opened it at random, and began reading. Immediately my feeling of being rushed …
When Humanitarianism Turns Realistic
Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed: The MSF Experience by Claire Magone, Michael Neuman, and Fabrice Weissman, eds. Columbia University Press, 2011, 250 pp. On March 19, 2011, French and British forces, with the military support of the United States, launched a massive …
Alternate Modernity in Asia
From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia by Pankaj Mishra Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012, 356 pp. Pankaj Mishra asks good questions. As he has ascended from posh-poor Brahmin in provincial India, to New York Review of …
The Microhistorian
The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death by Jill Lepore Knopf, 2012, 304 pp. The Story of America: Essays on Origins by Jill Lepore Princeton University Press, 2012, 420 pp. In high school, Jill Lepore—now an Americanist …
Through the Workers’ Blood
The Right and Labor in America: Politics, Ideology, and Imagination Nelson Lichtenstein and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, eds. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012, 432 pp. As the overall unionization rate in the United States dips ever closer to single digits, the …
What Obama Omitted
Dissent is a magazine for people who worry. So here is something to worry about, highlighted by Barack Obama’s inaugural address. I am certainly glad that it was his inauguration, but what he said or, better, didn’t say, illustrates one …
The Man Who Knows Himself
When Irving Howe died suddenly, in May 1993, no one was sure whether Dissent would keep going. The magazine’s young-ish editors and writers wanted to see it continue, but we all felt that it would thrive only if Michael Walzer …
Becoming a Dissentnik
Now that I am about to become an ordinary Dissentnik, I want to describe how that happened once before—in 1954, when I held the first issue of the magazine in my hands. I grew up in the Popular Front, reading …
