This Saturday, November 17, Dissent is hosting an open forum on the U.S. elections. Historians Michael Kazin, David Greenberg, and Kim Phillips-Fein will talk about current trends in American politics—how we got here, and where we’re headed. Michael Kazin is …
Intense tropical cyclones would presumably have formed in the absence of the current warming of the oceans by the greenhouse effect. Maybe Sandy would have been one of those. But the fact is that Sandy is not one of those.
Amid the barrage of humorous memes, status updates, tweets, and reports emanating from the second presidential debate, one moment was mostly lost, perhaps misfiled among those infamous “binders full of women.” When the candidates were asked to address the circulation …
Liberals have an obsession with the presidency. Since Franklin D. Roosevelt strode across the political arena like a colossus (albeit a colossus in a wheelchair), liberals have tended to equate success with electing one of their own to the White …
Welcome to Dissent‘s new website! On it, you’ll find our fall issue, with a special section on higher education. Right now, non-subscribers can read Aaron Bady and Mike Konczal’s “From Master Plan to No Plan: The Slow Death of Public …
His commentary was sharp, as much of Dissent is, but I always imagined him writing with a smile on his face, while many of our other writers write with grim determination.
There are two dangers in constructing a history of greater Sudan since the conclusion of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in January 2005. First, there is the pronounced tendency by interested parties to rewrite key parts of this history in ways …
Sometimes pictures tell the story best. Last year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change complied and published the results of several studies on renewable energy. The good news is that there is tremendous potential for the use of renewable forms …
Brian Beutler at Talking Points Memo notices something odd in Mitt Romney’s health insurance rhetoric. The uninsured, in Romney’s world, always live in apartments. “We don’t have people who become ill, who die in their apartment because they don’t have …
There is no such thing as a spontaneous strike, protest, or any other kind of social irruption. Spontaneity is just another word for ignorance on the part of those in power who are the object of subaltern scorn and protest.
Here is one more thing in which Israel is imitating America: neocon tactics. American neocons think that American universities are overwhelmingly liberal, and so they have created alternatives in the form of think tanks designed to foster conservative thought. This, …
News organizations must be held accountable for the impact their use of “illegal” has not only on individual readers, but also on communities and on any chance of future congressional action.
While Hobsbawm will be remembered as a historian of singular gifts, his writings already seem less a harbinger of the shape of things to come than sterling examples of an older kind of scholarship at its best.
Eugene D. Genovese, one of the foremost left-wing scholars of his time, has died. A teenage member of the Communist Party kicked out for “having zigged when I was supposed to zag,” he gained national notoriety in 1965 for welcoming “the impending Viet Cong victory” at a Rutgers teach-in.
By echoing a creed that failed the nation at the end of the nineteenth century, the conservatives who rule the GOP make it almost impossible to have a serious debate about how to solve our problems in the early twenty-first.
