Winter 2026

I have been reading in the newspapers that the CIA is in trouble (in the same way, almost, that you and I might be in trouble). With the end of the cold war, it has lost its raison d’être; influential …

Supporters of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) portrayed all these as mere extensions of trade liberalizing initiatives familiar in the …

This is a courageous and painfully honest book that must have been very hard to write. Although it is very well written, it will earn David Rieff few friends. It is extraordinarily difficult to write serious reportage about Bosnia-Herzegovina while …

In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois reflected on the ironies of reaching the academic heights, always sensing his racial distinctiveness, always confronting the hesitant curiosity of sympathetic whites, always coping with their unasked question: “How does it …

The two appear to have nothing in common but an appearance on David Letterman’s The Late Show. Relaxed, smoking a cigar, and toying with the host, she broke the record for vulgarity on network television. Smiling nervously and awkwardly swinging …

I begin with a straightforward proposition that there have been three types of black political leadership in twentieth century America: (1) pragmatic activist, (2) systemic-radical, and (3) ethno-radical. The first of these refers to what we commonly think of as …

The history of modem society, from one point of view,” Christopher Lasch observed in Haven in a Heartless World, “is the assertion of social control over activities once left to individuals and their families.” This, at any rate, is the …

Economists have begun using the term “winner-take-all economics” to describe the fact that the salaries of investment bankers, software designers, and basketball players continue to rise while the wages of photocopy attendants and paramedics stagnate or fall toward the official …

Should we, half a century later, reconsider the morality of Hiroshima? “No,” will retort apostles of what may be called “Patriotic Correctness.” (I borrow the phrase from Robert Hughes.) For these PCers, self-questioning is always tantamount to anti-Americanism. But a …

It is by now a truism that television has usurped many of the traditional roles of political parties; more than that, it sometimes seems to have all but devoured the political process. Power flows to politicians and journalists who exploit …

There was a time when trade unionists despaired of finding justice in the American courts. Consider the landmark cases: In re Debs (1894), handing federal judges unlimited power to restrain labor activity by means of injunctions; Loewe v. Lawlor (1908), …

The publication schedule of Dissent doesn’t fit neatly with the political schedule of American democracy — so we were not able to “cover” the electoral disaster of November ’94. But the role of a quarterly is, in any case, to …

According to standard criteria, the United States is one of the most religious countries in the industrialized world—perhaps the most religious country. More than 40 percent of Americans claim to attend religious services each week, compared to 14 percent of …