A competent polemicist, David Goodhart has produced a slick diatribe against left critics of the third way in general and, in particular, my annotation of the Blair-Schroeder manifesto. He’s also reproduced in his writing the defects of the politics he’s …
The end of Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial was a signal to the nation’s varsity pundits—time to begin overall evaluations of l’affaire Monica. The award for “most lugubrious wrap-up” goes to David Gergen. Speaking on a panel aired by C-SPAN, Gergen …
I am an immigrant to Dissent-land from the shores of the New Left. Although I’ve had my naturalization papers since 1986, my nontraditional background got me this Last Page assignment. For the magazine’s forty-fifth anniversary, the editors asked me to …
News from the affirmative action battle front: two members of the top brass have deserted the hard-line opposition. Nathan Glazer, who crusaded against affirmative action for more than two decades, has switched sides. Glenn Loury, who broke with the neoconservatives …
Some of us Dissenters agitated year after year for a design overhaul and a new logo for the magazine. So I had high hopes when the revolution began last January, that is, when Michael Walzer, Mitchell Cohen, the staff, and …
Ten years ago, I signed my first contract for a book in the middle-grade fiction category—a Bobbsey Twins mystery about sunken treasure. For the treasure, I devised a gold Aztec statuette—priceless, potent, and ruthlessly pilfered. After the Bobbseys cracked the …
At first glance, Zelda Bronstein seems to make a half-dozen plausible arguments in “Feminist Pundits on Hillary Clinton”: to start, feminist pundits didn’t pay enough attention to the Clinton administration’s health care reform effort; second, feminist pundits didn’t pressure Hillary …
Democratic politics in my version of utopia looks different from Michael Walzer’s version in at least one way. When thousands of energetic citizens take part in a presidential or congressional campaign, they might help organize a rally, update a web …
Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, two Marxist economists, began writing Monopoly Capital in the mid-1950s. After Baran died in 1964, Sweezy put the already revised manuscript into final form, and Monthly Review Press published the work in 1966. …
JUNE 1996. TURIN, ITALY: After a seventeen-year absence, no surprise that I had forgotten how lovely much of this city is: deep porticos running up and down the boulevards, giving shade to posh cafés and shops; baroque palazzi whose carved …
Two and a half years as book editor at the Muppets opened my eyes: we live in the age of the licensed image. Before my sensitization, I admit I’d never reflected on the “source” of, say, the Mickey Mouse watch …
It was 1968, and I had applied to graduate schools in the field of French literature. Someone from Tufts University—a male dean or department chair, I can’t remember—called to say the faculty had accepted my application. In fact, he chatted …
In 1944, John Maynard Keynes suffered a heart attack as he ran up a flight of stairs on his way to yet another committee meeting in the New Hampshire resort called Bretton Woods. Meetings, especially those deciding the economic fate …
From the mid-1960s to 1980, the piazzas belonged to the left in Italy. So did the bookstores, since dominant culture—criticism, political science, philosophy, the arts—leaned heavily to the left. Conservatives despaired: Oh, when would Italy become a normal West European …
