Who Reads Dissent?

“Nobody reads Dissent but a bunch of old lefties.” So said one of our friends in the course of discussions about the magazine’s future after Irving Howe’s death last year. The remark was meant as a provocation, and so the editors took it.

But the irony wasn’t lost; we realized that, in the nearly forty years of Dissent‘s existence, no one had ever bothered to do a systematic study of our readership.

Last summer, we set out to red...