Articles - Dissent Magazine

America’s Other Election

Gary Gerstle ▪ Fall 2016

Rolling back Republican domination in the states will not be easy. But it is a battle that must be joined.

China’s younger generation of feminists pose a unique threat to the Communist Party. By celebrating single, queer, and often child-free women, they are challenging government edicts that marriage and families are the foundation of the country’s political stability.

Rethinking Populism

John B. Judis ▪ Fall 2016

Donald Trump’s candidacy may have peaked. But, from the United States to Britain and beyond, the discontent fueling the far right won’t fade so quickly. Can a new, left-wing populism seize on it—and rebuild democracy in the process?

Gender Trouble in Poland

Ann Snitow and Katheryn Detwiler ▪ Fall 2016

Poland’s proposed abortion ban is part of a broader attack on women by the right-wing PiS government, which has sought to banish the word “gender” itself from the country’s vocabulary. But Polish feminists and their allies are fighting back.

A Feminism for Tomorrow: Introduction

Kaavya Asoka and Sarah Leonard ▪ Fall 2016

What are feminists thinking and doing today? We cast an eye to movements in the United States and abroad to help us imagine—and strategize—a more pluralist, and radical, feminism.

Introducing our Fall special section.

Not All the Single Ladies

Moira Weigel ▪ Fall 2016

The optimism of Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies is encouraging, but the book’s blindspots illuminate the limitations of contemporary liberal feminism.

Freedom from Abstraction

Andrew Seal ▪ Fall 2016

The Four Freedoms: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Evolution of an American Idea by Jeffrey A. Engel Oxford University Press, 2015, 248 pp. The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great by Harvey …

Love and Death in Revolution Square

Vadim Nikitin ▪ Fall 2016

“Suffering justifies our hard and bitter life,” writes Svetlana Alexievich of Soviet life. “For us, pain is an art.”

The Breadwinner-Homemaker Trap

Suzanne Kahn ▪ Fall 2016

Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict by Heather Boushey Harvard University Press, 2016, 360 pp. What Works: Gender Equality by Design by Iris Bohnet Harvard University Press, 2016, 400 pp. [contentblock id=3 img=html.png] To illustrate the tensions between work …

Steady Work

David Marcus ▪ Fall 2016

When left activists divide their energies between the immediate present and the distant future, we miss the necessary political work between now and then.

The Sobbing School: Three Poems

Joshua Bennett ▪ Fall 2016

Three poems from Joshua Bennett’s The Sobbing School.

Family Portrait

Madeleine Schwartz ▪ Fall 2016

Mom Relaxing My Hair, 2005, by LaToya Ruby Frazier. © LaToya Ruby Frazier. At first, you might feel you are intruding. This is a private moment. A mother helping her daughter prepare for the outside world. On the table, tools …

Statelessness: A Forgotten Crisis

Mira Siegelberg ▪ Fall 2016

The Nubian community has lived in Kenya for over a hundred years, yet many became stateless after Kenya’s independence in 1963. For years, Nubian youth had to go through a nationality verification process called “vetting” in order to obtain a …

Britain’s London Problem

Peter Mandler ▪ Fall 2016

June 24 On June 23 the UK voted to leave the European Union after thirty years of a halting, sometimes noble, often messy experiment in international cooperation. In my circles—professional, well-educated, Cambridge and London—the principal reaction was incredulity. How could …

A Radical History of Free Speech

Sophia Rosenfeld ▪ Fall 2016

With the rhetoric of free speech increasingly captured by the right, a new book tells the story of the radicals who first championed freedom of expression as a substantive political right.

Winter 2025