Sins of Omission
Arthur Miller’s landmark play The Crucible illuminates the difference between informing and truth-telling.
Fall 2024
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Give Peace a Chance
In their new documentary series The Vietnam War, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick offer a sharp indictment of an atrocious war. But when it comes to portraying the antiwar movement, they lapse into troubling stereotypes.
In the Hands of “New York’s Boldest”: Cecily McMillan at Rikers
Rikers Island is a bleak atoll in New York City’s East River, festooned with razor wire, home to some 13,000 prisoners, and run by correctional officers (“New York’s boldest,” as they call themselves) with serious attitude issues. It was not …
The Disturbing Verdict Against Cecily McMillan
On Saturday, May 3, my son and I took Cecily McMillan to lunch. Cecily, as is now widely known, is an Occupy Wall Street activist and the defendant for the past month in a criminal trial for allegedly assaulting a …
An Occupier’s Trial
Cecily McMillan has had trouble concentrating on the master’s thesis she is supposed to be writing this spring under my direction at the New School in New York City, a study of the political beliefs and career of the late, …
Steady Work: Sixty Years of Dissent
A history of Dissent magazine, by Maurice Isserman.
Starting Out in the Fifties 
The purpose of this new magazine is suggested by its name. . . . The accent of Dissent will be radical. Its tradition will be the tradition of democratic socialism. We shall try to reassert the libertarian values of the …
50 Years Later: Poverty and The Other America
When Michael Harrington’s The Other America: Poverty in the United States first appeared in bookstores in March 1962, its author had modest hopes for its success, expecting to sell at most a few thousand copies. Instead, the book proved a …
Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Road to Socialism
From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice by Thomas F. Jackson
Roll Over, Krupskaya: American Consumerism in the New Russia
Moscow’s mayor Yury Luzhkov decreed this past spring that the city’s retail outlets would no longer be able to call themselves by such western-inspired names as “supermarket,” “drug store,” or “shop.” As of June 1, businesses in the city were …
Michael Harrington and the Debs-Thomas Tradition
The death of Michael Harrington in 1989 marked a melancholy turning point in the history of twentieth-century American socialism. Not since Eugene Debs made his initial run as the Socialist candidate for president of the United States in 1900 had …
Hardhats and Longhairs
In May 1970, as a college student in Portland, Oregon, I took part in the national campus strike protesting the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the killing of four students at Kent State University by the Ohio National Guard. Every …
Closing the File on Erlich and Alter
Fifty years ago this winter, the Soviet government announced that a crime had been committed. The circumstances of the crime were misstated. The date of the crime was misreported. The victims of the crime were described as if they were …
Spin Control
“Buddy once said something reasonably sensible to me a couple of years ago,” he said. “If I can remember what it was.” He hesitated. And Franny, though still busy with her Kleenex, looked over at him. When Zooey appeared to …
Black Protest Movements
The Montgomery bus boycott began in December 1955 when Rosa Parks, a black seamstress, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus to a white passenger. For a full year after her arrest blacks in …
