Highlights from Dissent in 2013
Highlights from Dissent in 2013
2013 was a big year for Dissent. To celebrate, we’re highlighting a few of the year’s biggest hits.
To celebrate 2013, we’re highlighting the year’s biggest hits! Read on.
- Cockblocked by Redistribution: A Pick-up Artist in Denmark by Katie J.M. Baker. “He concludes that the typical fetching Nordic lady doesn’t need a man ‘because the government will take care of her and her cats, whether she is successful at dating or not.’ He’s not wrong.”
- Feminism’s Tipping Point: Who Wins From Leaning In? by Kate Losse. “Sandberg has penned not so much a new Feminine Mystique as an updated Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.”
- Trickle-Down Feminism by Sarah Jaffe. “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.”
- A Right to Marry? Same-sex Marriage and Constitutional Law by Martha Nussbaum. “There is indeed something odd about the mixture of casualness and solemnity with which the state behaves as a marrying agent.”
- Opportunity Costs: The True Price of Internships by Madeleine Schwartz. “Compliant, silent and mostly female, these interns have become the happy housewives of the working world.”
- The Microhistorian by Francesca Mari. “Striking an emotional connection is how Lepore resolves the central tension of microhistory—the desire not to generalize but localize, and yet at the same time, in localizing, to say something universal.”
- The Emergent Academic Proletariat and Its Shortchanged Students by Claire Goldstene. “For the vast majority of people affiliated with them, universities no longer provide a pathway to the middle-class, but instead perpetuate continual fiscal anxiety and give rise to a class defined by its financial insecurity. And this economic uncertainty shapes political behavior.”
- Girl Geeks and Boy Kings by Melissa Gira Grant. “It’s not just the promise of women and women to look at it; it’s woman as hostess, woman as civilizer, woman not just as object of value, but, through her presence, a producer of a more valuable Facebook.”
- Plutocrats at Work: How Big Philanthropy Undermines Democracy by Joanne Barkan. “Without countervailing forces, wealth in capitalist societies already translates into political power; big philanthropy reinforces this tendency.”
- The Risk Ownership Society by Steve Randy Waldman. “If we wish to be free in the way that Americans understand freedom, have we no choice but to submit to a faceless, periodically psychotic ‘economic chance-world’?”
Our labor podcast, Belabored, launched in 2013. Hosts Sarah Jaffe and Michelle Chen have rounded up a year of labor tumult here, and you can check out back episodes, featuring interviews with leaders like Karen Lewis.
Recent issues have featured a new front of the book, featuring cultural criticism ranging from Atossa Araxia Abrahamian’s take on postmodern cosmopolitanism to editor Nick Serpe’s investigation of poverty-porn reality television.
Happy reading, happy holidays, and see you in 2014!
