Preliminary Dialogue: The co-editor of Dissent argues with a philosophical friend to determine the truth (or a truth) of the matter. MW: The definite article is wrong. How could there be one good society, given the immense variety of human …
By the time this article sees print, our eyes will have blurred from reading that Barack Obama, the first African American to win the presidential nomination of a major party, has accomplished a feat that many Americans would not have …
Modernism: The Lure of Heresy by Peter Gay W.W. Norton, 2007, 640., pp $35.00 Peter Gay has had a remarkable career as a scholar. He has gone through many metamorphoses and left a great paper trail. Well into his eighties, …
Fifty-nine years after its Broadway debut, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s South Pacific is once again drawing applause. At this year’s Tony Award ceremony, it topped all musicals, winning seven awards. But the most serious praise for New York City’s …
Darfur’s ongoing agony continues to be attended by an obscene chorus of international mendacity, hypocrisy, and expediency. Not content simply to allow Khartoum’s génocidaires to accomplish their ghastly task, the African Union, the Arab League, the Non-Aligned Movement, key Security …
Throughout American history, politicians and public officials have exploited public anxieties about crime and disorder for political gain. The difference today is that these political strategies and public anxieties have come together in the perfect storm. They have radically transformed …
Torture and Democracy by Darius Rejali Princeton University Press, 2007, 880 pp., $39.95 America, under George W. Bush, became a torturing country. Everyone knows it. One of Bush’s worst lies is this: “I’ve said to the people that we don’t …
For all their differences, the two leading presidential candidates have both spotlighted the promotion of human rights internationally as a cornerstone of a rebuilt American foreign policy. John McCain, breaking from Republican orthodoxy, has said that “promoting human rights abroad …
Kirill Medvedev is a new and very attractive figure on the Russian cultural landscape. A poet first, he published two books of confessional free verse early in this decade to much acclaim as well as controversy. Soon after, spurred in …
In April 1983, the U.S. Department of Education published A Nation at Risk, (ANAR) a “landmark” report lamenting the condition of American public education. It was the culmination of criticism that had been mounting since early in the cold war …
In retrospect, the nineties can seem an anomalous decade, the only one since the Second World War when technological civilization did not appear particularly bent on self-destruction. Of course, not everyone greeted the end of the cold war as the …
The 2008 Democratic primary campaign was an extraordinary political event—actually, given the length of our election process, a long series of events—which both energized and divided the most important constituencies of the American liberal-left. We don’t know how the energy …
Race and gender—hot topics, even without the recent primary election that pitted a black man against a white woman. With it, they’re incendiary. But even a brief look at the historical record tells us how much the past is parent …
“The service was not so good,” an acquaintance told me of the highly rated restaurant for which she had made reservations six months in advance. A waitress myself, I asked what she meant. Pausing, she came up with only one …
In the spring of 1995, when Lane Kirkland’s old order was toppling and John Sweeney’s young(er) Turks were poised to revitalize the American labor movement, one of the movement’s leading operatives gave me his take on what was behind the …
