Sometime in late 1992, there was a rally in Little Rock, Arkansas, where President-elect Bill Clinton was busily sorting through résumés and position papers. Although the rally drew about a thousand people, it was little noted in the major media; …
Graduate students go on strike at Yale. The California Board of Regents strikes down affirmative action in the University of California system. Massive student marches clog lower Manhattan. Each of these incidents—and many others—testifies to a deep and wrenching, if …
Recently I found myself discussing the dawning of contemporary feminism with two young women—one a first-year student at Brandeis and another a senior in high school about to enter Brandeis. My cousin—the high school senior—was writing her senior thesis on …
In my activist bones something always makes me yearn to support a demonstration or a march. And certainly, given the unrelenting attack on public policies that benefit the majority of blacks, there is an urge to applaud any nonviolent action …
The Zimbabwean novelist Chenjerai Hove has said, “In hard times the artist will blend images of despair with those of hope. In good times the writer will depict the madness of over-eating at the expense of cultivating other values.” In …
The welfare state has always been under attack—by socialists, as something that falls short of socialism; by free marketeers, as socialistic. For twenty years, knowledgeable observers have been predicting its demise. What is its condition today? Is it moribund, or …
You all know the phrase “a ballplayer’s ballplayer,” which describes someone whose qualities are best appreciated by people in the game. Manny was a socialist’s socialist, a dissenter’s dissenter. Only people close to the magazine can even begin to understand …
After the 1994 election, two kinds of stories began to appear describing relations between the new Republican congressional majority and business groups. One kind depicted business leaders licking their chops, anticipating tax relief and relaxed regulation. As the GOP majority …
Among the most controversial opinions in this past year’s term of the United States Supreme Court was U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton, where five justices, over the bitter dissent of their four colleagues, struck down Arkansas’s attempt to impose term …
When I first came to work at Dissent, Mark Levinson told me a little about the different people who worked at the magazine. When he got to Manny, he said, “You’ll like Manny. Manny’ll make you feel at home.” Then …
It was not long ago that very few readers had heard of Michael Eric Dyson. However, during the past five years Dyson has been an intellectual whirlwind. His writings have appeared in many national journals, he has published two books, …
A lot of good people came to Washington last October 16. Surveys published afterward suggest that the “million men,” whatever their actual number, were a substantial representation of the African American working class and middle class (except that both these …
Last spring and summer, as Newt Gingrich and his followers gleefully set about dismantling what remained of the American welfare state, there were many stories in the press about the debut of the conservative magazine the Weekly Standard. For those …
Fidel Castro came to New York this past fall and had the wisdom to conclude his visit by popping into the offices of the New York Times. He boasted about how he had tricked the Times correspondent Herbert Matthews into …
In the spring of 1995, I taught an undergraduate class in women’s studies at Rutgers University, a large public university. All of the students, even the “nontraditional” ones, were younger than I. I felt a fine affection for my students: …
