Dissent UpFront: Welcome to Dissent‘s New Web-only Section

Welcome to Dissent‘s New Web-only Section

Today, Dissent UpFront makes its formal debut on our Web site. We have informally been running online articles since last summer. Our experimental period is over. We think that a Web-only section devoted to brief, timely pieces–shorts–as well as longer essays, debates, and interviews complements the quarterly articles that are Dissent’s bread and butter. But we are old fashioned in our insistence that the shorts and essays found in UpFront are not to be mistaken for a blog. We welcome personal pieces, but the standards that apply for writing in the magazine are the standards for UpFront. In our opinion all too many blogs—with their emphasis on the subjective and their lack of concern for hard evidence—have become little more than the equivalent of a Facebook for intellectuals.

Up Front was the title for the collection of Bill Mauldin’s Second World War cartoons that first appeared in Stars and Stripes, the newspaper of the U.S. armed forces. The cartoons featured two infantrymen, Willie and Joe, and one of their main complaints was the kind of military pomposity, epitomized by General George Patton, that ignored the day-to-day struggles soldiers experienced on the front lines. Mauldin’s legacy, his fascination—both grim and celebratory—with the ordinary, is as fine a legacy as modern America has to offer, and our hope is that in UpFront we can be worthy of Willie and Joe.