Spring 2024

After Ella Fitzgerald died last June, I picked out a few CDs, played them over and over, and became happier and happier at what I heard (except in the case of a horrible album with Andre Previn on piano, and …

If this were a nineteenth-century book and not a modern magazine, the last few entries of a lengthy, cluttered index might appear right here, listing every conceivable and inconceivable topic along with the appropriate page number. We see very few …

I have no particular quarrel with Stanley Hoffmann’s comments, not even with the one endorsing a “free enterprise system” in Russia. But since Dissent is a journal of the left, allow me to exhume an additional point from the ancient …

The question poses a choice between “radical hope,” which sounds grand, and “piecemeal” pleading for a “little more” democracy, which sounds piddling. Who would oppose “radical hope,” given such an alternative? From a realistic point of view, radical hope can, …

What was the source of Irving’s distinctive prose style? The lyricism that you find in World of Our Fathers, the tender and quizzical humor in that book, the immigrant pathos that manages to remain light, and the lightness that manages …

What is going to happen to the American left, now that the world is turning upside down? Let me begin with a picture of what has happened in the past. In the century and a quarter since the American Civil …

In The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe devotes a single passage to the way historical memory influences a certain kind of modern liberal sensibility. Wolfe’s Bronx assistant district attorney, Kramer, searching his political conscience, stumbles on the word “socialist” …

In my article in the Summer 1990 Dissent, I outlined what went wrong with the Nicaraguan revolution under Sandinista leadership. The article was written in March 1990. Events since then have confirmed the gist of what I said. One of …

A few days before the Somoza dictatorship was overthrown in 1979, Anastasio Somoza Debayle called a demonstration for himself in central Managua. A vast crowd descended on the rally grounds. A Nicaraguan journalist tells me that, looking at the immensity …

Self-Consciousness: Memoirs by John Updike Knopf, 1989, 257 pp., $18.95 A chapter from John Updike’s Self Consciousness ran some months ago in Commentary under the provocative title, “On Not Being a Dove.” Updike looked back at the loneliness that overtook …

The year of the stock market crash, 1987, was also the year of the intellectual crisis. Afterward the stock market seemed to right itself, but that can’t be said about the world of thought. Intellectual crises tend to be that …

Cuzcatlán, the title of Manlio Argueta’s new novel, is the old Indian name for El Salvador. In our own United States literature, names like that used to crop up often a century and a half ago: “Hiawatha,” “Chingachgook.” Unscrupulous poets …

Every place and time has a representative personality. For downtown New York in the period just ending—the New York of Soho and the East Village, middle 1980s—the representative personality is a certain type of bohemian, similar to other bohemians we …

The following remarks were delivered at the Socialist Scholars Conference in New York City in April 1986, at the panel on Israel and the U.S. Left.” The participants were Noam Chomsky, Ellen Willis of the Village Voice, and myself.—P.B. The …