Fall 2024

I have never served on a jury, but I have been a potential juror, waiting in the basement of the Trenton courthouse with many others. Four or five times I was called to sit there, for a couple of days …

One of the signs of left internationalist commitment is a strong interest in the politics of otherpeople’s countries. For many years, internationalism required a steady focus on the Soviet Union.Other countries lived in the shade. But Russia today looks more …

The world is a grim place these days, but here at home, in the months since November, our spirits have lifted a bit, and in this issue of Dissent we are able to publish a few hopeful articles. It’s not …

Is it possible to oppose the death penalty and still be in favor of killing tyrants? That is, I think, my own position, but the botched execution of Saddam Hussein, which looked more like savage revenge than impartial justice, made …

Todd Gitlin, Frances Fox Piven and Michael Walzer spoke at a City University of New York symposium on “The Vanishing American Left” in September 2006. These essays are drawn from their talks. —EDS. I don’t know about “vanishing”—we probably weren’t …

Jerry Slater’s polemic is notable most of all for its exaggerations. I am indeed a supporter of Israel, and only wish that I was as eminent, authoritative, prominent, well known, and influential as he says I am—for then I would …

We have no articles in this issue about the Lebanon war. Nobody in his or her right mind would venture to do a piece now (end of August) to be read in mid-October—when there might be a stable cease-fire or …

Notes from Down Under, after a month in Melbourne: The kangaroo isn’t as peculiar as the platypus or as funny-looking as the emu, but it is still a powerful argument against intelligent design. Of course, there is a counter-argument, according …

As we go to press, a great American city is being destroyed; tens of thousands of its inhabitants are in desperate straits. What happened in New Orleans at the end of August should prompt an urgent reconsideration of homeland security. …

As we go to press, a great American city is being destroyed; tens of thousands of its inhabitants are in desperate straits. What happened in New Orleans at the end of August should prompt an urgent reconsideration of homeland security. …

If poetry, as Wordsworth wrote, “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility,” political thought should take its origin from contention and anger similarly recollected. I suspect that tranquility is in short supply among our writers, but still, we try …

The experts have apparently agreed that it wasn’t values that lost us the last election. It was passion, and above all, it was the passion of fear. But maybe frightened people look for strong leaders, whose strength is revealed in …

There is a certain time perspective that goes with editing and writing for a quarterly. I am able to think very slowly, which is a way of thinking that comes naturally to me. How anyone writes regularly for the daily …