In her excellent, tightly reasoned “Against Academic Boycotts” (Dissent, Summer 2007), Martha Nussbaum notes that the “main force of the boycott” is directed against “individual members of the [Israeli] institutions,” who are accused of not condemning their “government as much …
The 1970s have a bad name—the “me decade,” a narcissistic time in which authority declined. The decade’s bleakness stands in contrast to the ’60s when the Movement and the New Left seemed to promise the dawn of a new day …
The specter of nuclear war has given rise to a small world of its own. It is a subcultural universe of scientists and engineers, bureaucrats, and ideologues concerned with the theory and practice of nuclear destruction. Their creeds and language …
After catastrophes like floods or hurricanes we see strange sights—the cow on the barn roof, the bed floating down Main Street. Revolutions, too, cast up strange sights that upset our expectations about the rightful order of things: religious leaders, messianic …
The Oppenheimer Case: Security on Trial, by Philip M. Stern, with the collaboration of Harold P. Green. New York: Harper & Row. 591 pp. $10. For his colleagues and most others who came into contact with him, J. Robert Oppenheimer …
Alienation and Freedom: The Factory Workers and His Industry by Robert Blauner University of Chicago Press, 1964, $7.50 “Alienation,” an increasingly fashionable word, is in danger of coming to mean nothing more than the vague sense of malaise many people …
Anything as bad a TV must be susceptible to some improvement, but the one sure way of not getting it is to make the programs more “cultural.” The TV chains and the FCC are momentarily nervous, and so they chatter …
The value of a socialist orientation to contemporary events is demonstrated by the most unlikely people. In the course of his mea culpa in Washington the head of the Columbia Broadcasting System set forth the framework for understanding the quiz …
The Mindless Typewriter If Dwight Macdonald’s “America!—Americal” [DISSENT, Fall 1958] were read by the European audience for whom it was intended, would it satisfy their curiosity about this strange land? What European needs to be told that there is a …
Our society prides itself on the fact that the concentration camp remains a thing apart, a distinctive feature of totalitarian society. We have prisons, of course, but the prisoner is usually protected from starvation, unrestrained brutality, and pitiless economic exploitation. …
When the state has to exercise its monopoly on the instruments of physical violence it is symptomatic of either a breakdown or a weakening of authority. This applies to Little Rock as well as Budapest. Little Rock, of course, is …
