Listing Left
Much of what we now take for granted as common sense was once espoused by people who often were widely considered left-wing radicals.
Winter 2025
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Caring on Stolen Time: A Nursing Home Diary
Our bodies’ need for a short respite was pitted against our residents’ immediate bodily needs. Either choice we made, we blocked out something deeply human—either our care for our own bodies or our care for others. Caring should not feel like stealing time.
After the Marikana Massacre: A Luta Continua
On August 16 of last year, South African police shot dead thirty-four mineworkers at the Lonmin Platinum mine in Marikana. People in South Africa are referring to this as the “Marikana moment,” a turning point where the realities of South …
Targeted Killing and Drone Warfare
Here is the difficulty with drones: the technology is so good that the criteria for using it are likely to be steadily relaxed. That’s what seems to have happened with the U.S. Army or with the CIA in Pakistan and Yemen.
Girl Geeks and Boy Kings
Facebook was, in its early days, powered by women—or rather, by photographs of women, and by the unceasing clicks of men and of women seeking out photos of women.
Trickle-Down Feminism
While we debate the travails of some of the world’s most privileged women, most women are up against the wall. And yet for much of mainstream feminist discourse, it’s as if the economy hasn’t shifted, or as if there’s nothing about it worth examining from the standpoint of gender.
Introduction: The New Feminism
The “end of men,” “having it all,” the “richer sex” — women, it would seem, have finally arrived. But this celebration is one part toast to the wealthy exceptions, and one part nonsense.
Borking Antitrust: Google Secures Its Monopoly
One of Robert Bork’s last acts was to bless Google’s near-monopoly over search advertising as “pro-competitive” in an October 2012 white paper commissioned by Google. On Thursday the Federal Trade Commission showed, once again, Bork’s enduring influence.
The Users of the University
Next time you hear a pundit say that to preserve America’s competitiveness or dynamism, we must replace the liberal arts with something more “practical,” take a second to check what they studied.
Reader’s Détente: The Decline of the Digest
In a meeting between President Ronald Reagan and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, when the friends were both in high office, the president asked Mulroney, “Brian, did you read that article in the Reader’s Digest that trees cause pollution?”
Dissent contributors on Michigan’s right-to-work law: Colin Gordon looks at the faulty economics, Richard D. Kahlenberg and Moshe Z. Marvit tell the ugly racial history of the idea, and Michael Kazin reminds us why people would miss unions if they vanished.
After the Massacre
Dissent contributors reflect on the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. Read posts by Saul Cornell, Bryce Covert, and Elliott J. Gorn.
Warrior-Critics
Nearly everyone on the battlefield is just fighting “to not get licked.” That’s more a testament to the poverty of our social relations than to the poverty of individual souls, and it’s just as pertinent to the impoverishment of our social imagination as it is to the amorality of war.
Scapegoats in a City Under Siege
The Central Park Five is a powerful reminder of what can happen when innocents are caught up in racial divisions and tensions they didn’t create and railroaded for a crime they didn’t commit, and when all of the city’s institutions collaborate in the horrific act.
Citizen Coupon
Conservatives and neoliberals envision a government that provides a comparable range of benefits to the one advocated by earlier American liberals. But rather than designing and delivering services directly, the neoliberal government provides coupons for citizens.
