Radical Algebra: Who Figures in Equations?  

Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights by Robert P. Moses with Charles E. Cobb, Jr. Beacon Press, 2001, 192 pp., $21 Is math education today’s civil rights struggle? Are children in inner-city and poor rural schools the dispossessed sharecroppers …







India and the Bomb  

Three years after India and Pakistan shocked the world with their nuclear tests, it is worth revisiting their arguments for nuclear weapons. Many in the West have already accepted those arguments and grown used to the idea that both countries …



Making Books  

The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read by Andre Schiffrin Verso Books, 2000, 181 pp., $23 Book Business: Publishing Past Present and Future by Jason Epstein  Norton, 20001, 188 pp., $21.95 …



Living Wage 101  

Recently, after nine years of resolutely ignoring pleas, letters, e-mails, and the occasional phone call, I went to my first ever college alumni event. The reason was not a sudden burst of pride or the creeping nostalgia of age—rather it …







Street Smarts  

One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy by Thomas Frank Doubleday, 2000, 414 pp., $26.00 This is the story of a bizarre and, according to its narrator, victorious cultural counterrevolution. Thomas Frank calls …



Germany Remembers the Sixties  

The photographs of the foreign minister should not have surprised anyone. Indeed, most observers of German politics were still getting used to seeing him in three-piece suits when the pictures of Joschka Fischer lunging at a Frankfurt police officer during …



Making Genocide Thinkable  

When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda by Mahmood Mamdani Princeton University Press, 2001, 364 pp., $29.95 Anyone sets out to show how genocide can become thinkable ought to have an eye on the line beyond …



The Political Potential of the Web  

As a loyal, if discontented, Dissent reader, I was only mildly surprised that you would print a pair of articles that are sullen and cautionary about a recent technological and cultural phenomenon called the Internet (“The Information Society, the New …