In his essay “Tenure Trouble” (Dissent, Winter 1998), Jon Wiener presents much too narrow a view of the rising opposition to academic tenure, its rationale, and causes. Following Wiener’s precedent, let me disclose that I was a tenured faculty member …
Cold New World does what certain novels used to do: reveal the moral condition of a time and place by telling stories on a large, intimate scale. Near the end of his book, William Finnegan introduces what in fiction would …
The Vatican statement on the Shoah* addresses two questions: Why didn’t Church authorities speak out against the murder of the European Jews? And is there a relationship between Christian anti-Judaism and Nazi anti-Semitism? It is still unclear why Pope Pius …
Taylor branch’s new volume is a major achievement—a product of prodigious research and a gift for storytelling on an epic scale. Taken together with his earlier Pulitzer Prize–winning Parting the Waters and his projected third volume, At Canaan’s Edge, Branch’s …
On July 2, 1977, a seventeen-year-old boy set fire to an abandoned tenement building on New York City’s Lower East Side. This fire was just a flicker in an enormous mid-1970s arson wave that struck New York’s poorest neighborhoods; it …
In part one of this essay (“The HMO Revolution: How It Happened, What It Means,” Dissent, Spring 1998) I explored the rapid growth of HMOs, noted potential advantages that prepaid group practices held over traditional fee-for-service arrangements, and considered a …
If class is the key to history, here in America it is a secret key, at once central and unsayable. Informing so much of our national life, it is at the same time the social divide we will not permit …
As the European Union (EU) moves steadily toward fuller political integration in the form of the single European currency, attitudes on the left toward projects of supranational governance remain ambivalent. Currently in Britain, the Labour Party under Tony Blair presents …
In recent years the last episodes of certain long-running sitcoms have become a major cultural events in American life. Record numbers of us turn on our television sets to watch what is going to happen to people who have been …
I am a professor of English at a small, selective college in central New York. Isolated in an obscure valley, the school and its surrounding village sometimes remain white with snow until late spring. A black tenured member of this …
BEFORE THE Jamaican elections last December I visited Clive Dobson, president of the National Workers Union (NWU), at the union’s modest, two-story office amid the Victorian decay of downtown Kingston. Michael Manley headed this union for nearly twenty years before …
Should “Americanization” take place by consent of the governed? The question was posed eight decades ago by a rebellious intellectual, Randolph Bourne. He was responding to polemics—both political and cultural—about “hyphenated-Americanism,” roused by immigration but more broadly by a changing …
This is a good and useful book. At a time when mediocre economic performance is celebrated as though it were excellent, and when even the ugly consequences of mediocre performance, such as rising inequality, are commonly treated as though they …
The collapse of the Asian economies was one of the great economic surprises of the last half-century. Countries recently celebrated as “economic tigers” are now recipients of a $121 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and are seen …
For some time time now it has been fashionable to bemoan the end of the age of the great French intellectuals. In the early 1980s, Sartre, Barthes, Lévi-Strauss, and Foucault all passed from the scene. Louis Althusser experienced a metaphorical …
