Election Notes
Election responses from Tim Barker and Sarah Leonard, David Bromwich, Mark Engler, Max Fraser, Ryan Rafaty, Rafia Zakaria, Kevin Mattson, Gary Gerstle, and Benjamin Ross.
Spring 2025
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A Charter for the 99 Percent
Now, the next phase of a 99 percent movement needs to get—and keep—busy. Why do I say “next phase”? Because the Occupy movement that came about in 2011 has accomplished just about as much of its mission as possible.
The Rise and Fall of the American Linguistic Empire
Lawrence Summers’s celebration of the global reach of English can only be read as an unabashed apology for American empire. By even the most strategically hard-headed criteria, however, cadres drawn from a monolingual American elite are a poor choice as ambassadors of U.S. interests.
Fathers and Sons
P.T. Anderson is less interested in structures and institutions than in the psychological and archetypal nature of his bigger-than-life, sometimes mad characters. And so his latest film, The Master, isn’t the docudrama about a Scientology-like cult that some people expected it to be.
Dreams Diminished: Cuba on the Eve of an American Election
Four years ago on the embargo-stricken island, Obama’s election fueled a wave of optimism for improved relations between the two countries, a development that some see as a necessary step to improving life on the island.
Frankenstorms
Intense tropical cyclones would presumably have formed in the absence of the current warming of the oceans by the greenhouse effect. Maybe Sandy would have been one of those. But the fact is that Sandy is not one of those.
Grad Students to the Barricades
If graduate students like myself do not want to come into work one day to find ourselves replaced by video lectures delivered by “information curators,” we will have to learn to take collective action.
The Corporatization of Higher Education
It is not just the economic climate in which our colleges and universities find themselves that determines what they charge and how they operate; it is their increasing corporatization.
From Master Plan to No Plan: The Slow Death of Public Higher Education
When Mitt Romney urges Americans to “get as much education as they can afford,” or when university administrators call the police as their first response to student protest, it’s Ronald Reagan’s playbook they’re working from.
Remembering Murray Hausknecht, 1925-2012
His commentary was sharp, as much of Dissent is, but I always imagined him writing with a smile on his face, while many of our other writers write with grim determination.
Social Policy and Poverty: Don’t Fear Europe!
My own education in American social policy began intensively in 1980. That year, three events cemented my interest in American poverty and the U.S. public response to it.
A New Era for Wal-Mart Workers?
There is no such thing as a spontaneous strike, protest, or any other kind of social irruption. Spontaneity is just another word for ignorance on the part of those in power who are the object of subaltern scorn and protest.
Universities and the Urban Growth Machine
Why has the price tag of an American college degree skyrocketed (500 percent in the public sector since 1985) in recent decades?
Certain Problems Need Socialist Solutions
We have reached the point where the satisfaction of material human needs no longer requires that every adult on the planet work a forty-hour week. The jobs are not coming back.
Who Gets to Define Immigrants as “Illegal”?
News organizations must be held accountable for the impact their use of “illegal” has not only on individual readers, but also on communities and on any chance of future congressional action.
