Spring 2024

IN THE EVER-EVOLVING and convoluted story of affirmative action in the United States, June 28, 2007 will stand out as a paradox. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority managed in one ruling to undermine racial integration in primary and secondary education …

It was a drug deal gone bad. Two white men from the suburbs drive to Harlem one night to buy cocaine. There’s a hassle, a shot, and one of them ends up dead. The judge in the state criminal court …

Call this a reckless claim, but I know I made the main point of my article clear—that is, Dissent magazine’s editors and writers in the 1950s didn’t criticize the liberals for not being socialists; they criticized liberals for not defending …

The author reads Dissent from the 1950s to determine the failures and successes of cold war liberalism

Getting ready for the Olympic Games in Turin

Joanne Barkan asks whether globalization is turning Europe into a museum

If you’re an American who didn’t support the war in Iraq, what have been your choices since “major combat operations” ended in April 2003? Call for withdrawing U.S. troops, leaving the Iraqis to cope with the colossal and tragic mess …

Alain Tanner’s 1976 film Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 qualified as an instant classic among my cohorts-American leftists of the sixties generation. Ask a few if they saw the film years ago, and you’ll probably get …

Dear ______, I knew something had gone wrong by the time the Dissent public forum called “Patriotism in a Time of War” ended that evening last October in New York City. Some people in the audience (although by no means …

Like a few million other people, I consider George Orwell one of my favorite political writers, but I don’t riffle through his books, looking for wisdom whenever a political crisis comes along. In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, …

A glass wall covered by blinds separated the courtroom participants from the spectators in the public gallery, but a hush enveloped both sides when the witness known as FWS-50 began to speak. Although a voice modulator screened her identity from …

Madison, Wisconsin, 1969: Late that spring, after the largest antiwar marches and the student strike that brought out the national guard, the graduate teaching assistants at the University of Wisconsin made labor history. They voted in favor of union representation, …

What a difference fourteen days can make. On May 13, the center-left coalition that had governed Italy since 1996 lost control of both houses of Parliament to the center-right coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi. Journalists everywhere have already catalogued the …