Editor’s Page

This is a big Dissent, partly because we are planning a special issue for Winter and could not hold articles over, partly because of an embarrassment of riches. Editors dream about this; I can’t explain it, nor can I do justice to our authors on this short page. We feature Marshall Berman’s essay on Times Square, a brilliant account of how urban space can, even if it mostly doesn’t, foster human freedom and social equality. Nelson Lichtenstein reconsiders C. Wright Mills’s first book, on the labor movement and its leaders. New Men of Power was mostly forgotten after the success of The Power Elite, which focused on a more likely group. But it is worth remembering now, as unions struggle for survival. Ulrich Beck continues our discussion of a topic sometimes neglected in the endless talk about economic globalization: what political regime, what distribution of power looms on the global horizon?

Among our many new writers, Amy D. Burke looks beyond the glowing reports of declining welfare rolls to the real meaning of “welfare reform.” Manuel DeLanda provides our first account of the debate over property rights on the Internet (we will return to this issue). Kanti Bajpai reiterates for an American audience the arguments he has been making in India against the deployment of nuclear weapons. n But our chief focus this fall is on schools and students. Over many years, the left has written about and worked on education because the schools we...