An earlier version of this ran at openDemocracy last week, before tens of thousands marched in Benghazi to demand the dissolution of Islamist militias—a demand soon supported by the Libyan government. The plot line could have leapt from the baroque …
Author’s note (added 9/25): Over the past few years, I have been an intermittent participant in local Brooklyn politics through New Kings Democrats and Prospect Heights Democrats for Reform, political organizations that hope to change the character of Brooklyn politics …
Last month, tens of thousands of undocumented young people from around the country inaugurated the Obama administration’s deferred action policy by applying en masse to live and work in the United States for a renewable two-year term. Among the applicants …
Editors
▪ September 20, 2012
Thai Jones, clearly discomforted by what my book is—essentially an ideological genealogy of a particular strain of revolutionary anarchism that flared into popularity in the 1880s and died in America with the explosion of the Haymarket bomb—employs the age-old dodge …
Horst Brand, a longtime editor and contributing editor of Dissent, died on August 25. At the time of his death, he was at work on what would have been his fifty-seventh article for Dissent. His first article appeared in our …
Editors
▪ September 17, 2012
Last Wednesday, the CUNY Graduate Center hosted a debate between author and journalist Chris Hedges and B. Traven of CrimethInc. Ex-Workers Collective on violence and “diversity of tactics” in Occupy and other social movements. The debate, moderated by CUNY sociology …
Yes, schoolchildren in Chicago are victims, but not of their teachers. They are victims of a nationwide education “reform” movement geared to undermine teachers’ unions and shift public resources into private hands; they are victims of wave after wave of …
Walking the green strip of Woldenberg Park in New Orleans recently, I wasn’t surprised to encounter a Holocaust memorial, but was surprised by how little it elicited in me. The memorial’s trope of “Never Again,” its praise of cultural harmony, …
Today the Chicago teachers went on strike—their first in almost twenty-five years. The road to the strike has been a long one that includes 1) efforts by the hedge-fund elite behind Stand for [on] Children (SFC) to make such an …
Editors
▪ September 10, 2012
Todd Gitlin is talking about his new book, Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street, on Tuesday and Wednesday in Maine. “Will there be an Occupy 2.0? Reflections on the roots, spirit, and promise …
Working the Convention From my seat this evening, high in the upper deck of Time Warner Cable Arena, I had an excellent view of the podium. I had a bird’s-eye view of the stage and, because I was to the …
Community Organizing and Kandahar The Obama campaign’s ground game from 2008 has become the stuff of legend. During the final days of the race, it seemed as though the ratio of field organizers to swing state voters was roughly one-to-one. …
There will be a memorial service for long-time Dissent editorial board member Patricia Cayo Sexton on Sunday, October 14 at 3 p.m. The service will be held at the Grand Hall in NYU’s Global Center, 238 Thompson Street, NY, NY. …
Paul (not Ryan) I suppose that wearing a jacket and tie on a Sunday afternoon flight over Labor Day weekend does stand out. Paul, the flight attendant, asked me why I was dressed up. I told him that I was …
[EVENTS] September Announcements for Dissent