Terror and the Ethics of Resistance
How we fight is who we are.
Fall 2024
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Against the Privilege Walk
Today’s privilege politics is preoccupied with calculating the relative degrees of social advantage among people who share the same broad goals.
A Modest Exercise in Freedom
The left is at its most intelligent and most ethical when it believes—and vigorously promotes the belief—that everyone has the right to be heard.
All Shook Up: The Politics of Cultural Appropriation
In the era of global capitalism, imagining the lives of others is a crucial form of solidarity.
Florence Gordon Writes a Memoir
It’s astonishing how little people know each other, even old friends. . . .
Scenes from the novel Florence Gordon.
The Man Who Knows Himself 
When Irving Howe died suddenly, in May 1993, no one was sure whether Dissent would keep going. The magazine’s young-ish editors and writers wanted to see it continue, but we all felt that it would thrive only if Michael Walzer …
Torture as a Growth Experience: Zero Dark Thirty
If you go to Metacritic and look up the reviews of Zero Dark Thirty, you’ll come away with the impression that it’s a masterpiece. It has a “metascore” of 95, signifying “universal acclaim.” The New York Times called it “unexpectedly …
The Madness of Art
In Henry James’s short story “The Middle Years,” an ailing writer is troubled by the conviction that only now, after many books, has he begun to find his true voice. All the work he’s done so far has been nothing …
Bull Session with Rahm Emanuel
Bull Session with Rahm Emanuel
The ‘New’ New Left
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That’s Not the William Buckley I Remember
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Remembering Joe Wood
I met Joe Wood in 1992, after mutual friends suggested that I might ask him to write for Dissent. I remember liking him immediately. He was an interesting mix: he was blunt, almost fierce, in his opinions, yet in his …
Emanuel Geltman (1914-1995)
When I first came to work at Dissent, Mark Levinson told me a little about the different people who worked at the magazine. When he got to Manny, he said, “You’ll like Manny. Manny’ll make you feel at home.” Then …
The Equalizer and Me: A Confession
Sometimes I worry that after I die I’ll find myself in an office, sitting across from a man who has a printout showing how I spent every minute of my life. He isn’t using the information to decide my fate. …
Remembering Irving Howe
Writers sometimes write a little differently after their reputations are made. Some become mandarins in their old age—wise, all too wise. Some let the belt out a few notches and settle into verbosity. A few, at the height of their …
