Dilemmas of Foreign Aid 
Cambodia’s Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land by Joel Brinkley
Fall 2025
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Dilemmas of Foreign Aid
Would You Like An Ankle Bracelet With That? Winners and Losers in Electronic Monitoring
Ankle bracelets are almost fashionable these days. Martha Stewart wore one on her television show. Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton may have converted them into a rite of passage for inebriated starlets. In fact, Chanel’s 2008 spring show featured ankle …
All for the Union…and Emancipation, too: What the Civil War Was About
One hundred fifty years after Confederate shots bombarded Fort Sumter, President Barack Obama officially proclaimed April 12, 2011, to be the first day of a four-year-long Civil War Sesquicentennial and called “upon all Americans to observe this Sesquicentennial with appropriate …
Dancing Over Catastrophes: The Far Right and Roma in Hungary
In February 1989, the northeast Hungarian city of Miskolc gave birth to a remarkable civil rights movement. When a proposal to expel hundreds of Roma from a public housing estate surfaced at the Miskolc city government, dissidents formed an “anti-ghetto …
Frontline Caregivers: Still Struggling
Flora Johnson takes care of her adult son Kenneth, who suffers from cerebral palsy. She used to work as a cashier at a unionized grocery store and made enough to buy a home in the Washington Square neighborhood on the …
From the Many, 99 Percent
The financial crisis and the ruin of recession are only a few years old, but we’ve been marching for forty years toward income inequality, a service-based economy (finance and fast food), and political rule by and for the rich. Where …
The “I” in Union
At a time when unions are floundering and popular sentiment toward organized labor is at an all-time low of 45 percent, one workers’ organization is thriving. The Freelancers’ Union, a nonprofit organization based in a trendy Brooklyn neighborhood, has more …
What Next for the Occupy Movement?
Whatever the effects of police repression and freezing weather, I believe that the men and women of the Occupations will still be making themselves heard when you read this. Something new and important has begun in American politics, and we …
More than Greed
Age of Greed by Jeff Madrick
Down and Out in the New Middletowns
“When I graduated from Muncie Central High School, you could go just about anyplace and get a job—a decent job,” says Dennis Tyler. Tyler has represented Muncie’s Delaware County in the Indiana State House since 2007, and this past November …
Don’t Blame the Workers
I don’t think my political analysis can be understood apart from my class experiences. And those experiences probably explain a lot about why I’m writing this essay on how workers have been betrayed, devalued, stigmatized, and misunderstood. I’m the kid …
But Now We See
Prophetic Encounters: Religion and the American Radical Tradition by Dan McKanan
How Can Architecture Be Democratic?
Editors: Joan Ockman’s lively review of several famous buildings and architects (“What Is Democratic Architecture?” Dissent, Fall 2011) asks what determines democratic architecture and answers that she is “suspicious of democracy talk in architecture.” I would go one step further …
Hugo Chávez as Postmodern Perón
What benefits has Hugo Chávez’s populist administration brought to the Venezuelan people? In a controversial 2008 Foreign Affairs article, “An Empty Revolution,” Venezuelan economist Francisco Rodríguez argues that the regime has not improved the quality of life in the country …
Educational Movements, Not Market Moments
For at least two decades, conservatives have argued that school choice was the last unachieved civil right. In 2010, some powerful moderate voices echoed their view and invoked the name of Rosa Parks to support it. At one screening of …
