Feature Archive

Mitu Sengupta on Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity: “It is astonishing that in an otherwise insightful book about a slum in this vibrant city, we find no examples of successful collective action, either among the residents of Annawadi or between the residents of Annawadi and the world outside. Such an absence makes this ‘single, unexceptional slum’ seem exceptional indeed.” (Photo: slum in Mumbai, 2010, by Cactusbones via Flickr creative commons)

Days after Occupy Wall Street began last September, the New York Times ran an op-ed by Dissent co-editor Michael Kazin asking, “Whatever Happened to the American Left?” In the spring issue, Kazin revisits that essay in light of Occupy, asking what has changed (and what hasn’t). Gary Gerstle introduces the essay and its respondents: William P. Jones, Ira Katznelson, and Marina Sitrin. (Photo of Banksy mural in Boston, via Flickr creative commons)

SUNY Purchase recently ordered the closing of alternative women's clinic on campus. “But Rush Limbaugh was nowhere to be seen at Purchase,” writes James Cersonsky. “The alt clinic’s shutdown is the offspring of a broader movement to make universities run more like corporations—patriarchy dressed in genderless neoliberal garb.” (Image: "Untitled (your body is a battleground)" by Barbara Kruger, 1989)

Opponents of Vladimir Putin were heartened by the mass rallies that began in December against the Russian leader. “However, barring a truly unexpected turn of events... Putin will remain in office until 2018 and could once again seek re-election after that,” writes Rafael Khachaturian. Recent political reforms “do not point so much to a liberalization of the political system as to a change in the Kremlin’s strategy.” (Photo: Putin and Medvedev at government meeting in 2009, via Wiki. Commons)

Who are the other Americans now? “The low-income population—of nearly 100 million poor and near-poor individuals—is larger than when [Michael] Harrington was writing, partly because millions of poor Americans were lifted above the poverty line by government benefits that did not exist then,” writes William Kornblum. “The majority of near-poor households, however, are downward sliders...who have fallen from a more secure niche in the middle class.” (Image from “The Catholic Workingman” by John Wheatley, 1909)

We've got two new pieces on U.S. climate change policy. Ryan Rafaty offers a critique of Obama's climate change “charm offensive,” asking what sort of reform we can expect from the current political system. George Sterzinger criticizes the carbon auction plan that failed early in the Obama adminstration—and presents an idea for a serious but more palatable way to cap carbon emissions. (Photo by 666666666 via Flickr creative commons, 2008)

“The usual interpretation of the phrase ‘the madness of art’ conjures up an attractive cliché,” writes Brian Morton: “the writer as a creature possessed, spilling out words in a divine frenzy. This isn’t the normal experience of the practicing fiction writer, the writer who’s found a way to keep going over the long haul, and it isn’t the idea of the artist that [Henry] James had in mind” when he coined the phrase. (Photo: Rodin statue of Balzac in DC, by clio1789 via Flickr cc)

Horatio Morpurgo interviews Giles Fraser, the former canon chancellor of St. Paul's Cathedral, who resigned last fall over the church's stance on Occupy London. “The Reformation was a protest movement—it was as much about power as anything....For all its faults, I think religion has that potential, to think bigger thoughts than we’re thinking at the moment.” (Photo: Occupy London in front of St. Paul's Cathedral, 10/11, Wiki. Commons)

When Godfrey Chesire was introduced to Iranian cinema twenty years ago, he thought he “would find a cinema both obvious and crude, although perhaps earnest and well-intended. What I found was film after film of astonishing sophistication and artistic originality, with a principled and impassioned humanism that recalled the Italian neorealists and made most Western films seem mechanistic and cynically amoral by comparison.”

“Why did thousands of London’s youngsters set about destroying shops and fighting against the police for four days in August 2011?” asks Federico Varese. “The official government interpretation...is that we are dealing with well-organized thieves and ‘petty criminality.’ This theory is belied by the Guardian study, which points to two ‘important’ themes motivating the young people who rioted: anger toward the police, and a more general sense of injustice and powerlessness.” (Photo: Peckham Rye after riots, by Amanda Vincent-Rous, 8/8/11, Flickr cc)

Sarah Leonard, editor of the food section in the latest issue of Dissent, sat down with Wendell Berry on his farm in Kentucky to talk about the U.S. food system. “The agri-industrialists have what they think is a rhetorical question addressed to my side: ‘If you farm by your principles, who’s going to decide who’s going to starve?’ We could put that question back to them: ‘Who’s going to decide who is going to starve when you get done polluting and eroding the arable land, and destroying all the world’s cultures of land husbandry?’ ” (Photo by Vineet Patel, 2010, via Flickr creative commons)

“The obvious convenience of recognizing the corporation as an entity separate from its investors,” writes Stephen F. Diamond, “leads many on the right and even some on the left to defend the concept and denigrate its critics.... Nonetheless, the recognition of corporations as persons...raises challenging questions about the nature of modern economic organization....The Occupy movement has performed a valuable service in putting that debate back on the table for public consideration.” (Photo by takomabibelot, 2011, via Flickr creative commons)

For the last decade or so, ed reformers have "been setting up programs to show the power of competition and market-style accountability to transform inner-city public schools," writes Joanne Barkan. But by 2010 "key reform players judged the pace of change too slow....Jonah Edelman, CEO of Stand for Children...sums up the thinking: 'We've learned the hard way that if you want to have the clout needed to change policies for kids, you have to help politicians get elected. It's about money, money, money.'" (Photo: Aspen Ideas Festival 2011, by Booz Allen Hamilton, via Flickr Commons)

Daniel Luban reviews David Graeber's Debt. "The financialization witnessed over the last few decades has certainly not resulted in a scaling down of economic transactions to fit the social relationships of local communities; quite the opposite....Perhaps the fact that the first decades of the supposed new credit era have so thoroughly diverged from Graeber's notions about what such an era entails calls for a reevaluation of his overall framework." (Photo by AntTree, 2010, via Wikimedia Commons)

Long after its founding, the Hadassah Medical Organization continues to carry out Henrietta Szold's vision of a "flourishing coexistence among Jews and Arabs," writes Eyal Chowers. "The art of peace requires that, in addition to our roles as citizens, we have a plethora of spheres and sites in which political and religious identities take the backseat. There people can embrace other personas: patients, doctors, coworkers-or simply, neighbors." (Hadassah University Hospital, Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons)

On March 17, Dissent and Verso Books held a panel at Left Forum called "The New Dangerous Class? Perspectives on Organizing Precarious Labor." The conversation, among writers and organizers who have worked with interns, contingent faculty, graduate student teachers, domestic workers, and guest workers, exceeded our expectations, and is essential listening for anyone thinking about how the new precarious workforce can fight for dignity and a fair wage.

Seminar, which opened on Broadway in November, depicts a creative writing class led by a gruff Alan Rickman. “Unlike ordinary workshop teachers, he does not require the students’ work to be circulated beforehand and instead reads it on the spot,” writes Jeffrey J. Williams. “But it doesn’t really matter whether Leonard reads the stories; it matters whether he can hook them up. He delivers what he’s paid for, not as a teacher but as a consultant.” (Photo by Benjamin Solah, via Flickr creative commons)

“It is time for supporters of labor to try an approach to reforming labor laws that does not involve a national conversation on the pros and cons of procedures like ‘card-check’....and instead focuses on the fact that labor organizing is a civil right,” write Richard D. Kahlenberg and Moshe Z. Marvit. “[J]ust as it is now illegal to fire or discipline someone for race or gender or national origin or religion, it would be illegal under the Civil Rights Act to fire or discipline someone for trying to organize or join a union.” (Photo: ILGWU photo archive, via Flickr creative commons)

Dissent presents Rafia Zakaria’s Pakistan Diary, on the lives of women in Karachi. “The mosques in the city, sometimes more than one on a single city block, are festooned with lights on their domed outsides. The inside, to me and to almost all the women at the airport, rich or poor or thin or fat or veiled or unveiled, is a mystery. Women do not go inside mosques in Pakistan; they pray at home.” (Photo: girls at a school in Karachi; UN Photo, via Flickr creative commons)

"Gambling is dice, not scratch cards; work is shoveling, not shelf-stacking; and the rallying call in 'Death to My Hometown' is solely directed at the 'boys,'" writes Natasha Lewis. "The world in Bruce Springsteen's new album, Wrecking Ball, is archaic and unreal....Even so, there is something to be said for the Boss's project. He unashamedly asserts the moral worth of those political values - freedom, justice, and cooperation - that should form the basis of any fight back."