Editor’s Page

I have always believed that the magazine is the crucial artifact of civilized life. Not the book—though good books are lovely things— for it is too solid an object, neither (as we say these days) reflexive nor interactive enough. Magazines are the place where books are tried out, reviewed, criticized, and, years later perhaps, reconsidered. They are home to an ongoing conversation, in our case, a political argument, in which many people participate, in different voices, in different genres. Essays, reports, comments, sketches, memoirs, symposia, reviews, polemics, letters (and an occasional poem): we publish all these, planning each issue to emphasize our “magazineness.” “Dissent is not a journal,” Irvi...