Not All the Single Ladies
The optimism of Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies is encouraging, but the book’s blindspots illuminate the limitations of contemporary liberal feminism.
Winter 2026
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Freedom from Abstraction 
The Four Freedoms: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Evolution of an American Idea by Jeffrey A. Engel Oxford University Press, 2015, 248 pp. The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great by Harvey …
Love and Death in Revolution Square
“Suffering justifies our hard and bitter life,” writes Svetlana Alexievich of Soviet life. “For us, pain is an art.”
The Breadwinner-Homemaker Trap
Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict by Heather Boushey Harvard University Press, 2016, 360 pp. What Works: Gender Equality by Design by Iris Bohnet Harvard University Press, 2016, 400 pp. [contentblock id=3 img=html.png] To illustrate the tensions between work …
Steady Work
When left activists divide their energies between the immediate present and the distant future, we miss the necessary political work between now and then.
The Sobbing School: Three Poems
Three poems from Joshua Bennett’s The Sobbing School.
Family Portrait
Mom Relaxing My Hair, 2005, by LaToya Ruby Frazier. © LaToya Ruby Frazier. At first, you might feel you are intruding. This is a private moment. A mother helping her daughter prepare for the outside world. On the table, tools …
Britain’s London Problem
June 24 On June 23 the UK voted to leave the European Union after thirty years of a halting, sometimes noble, often messy experiment in international cooperation. In my circles—professional, well-educated, Cambridge and London—the principal reaction was incredulity. How could …
Statelessness: A Forgotten Crisis
The Nubian community has lived in Kenya for over a hundred years, yet many became stateless after Kenya’s independence in 1963. For years, Nubian youth had to go through a nationality verification process called “vetting” in order to obtain a …
A Radical History of Free Speech
With the rhetoric of free speech increasingly captured by the right, a new book tells the story of the radicals who first championed freedom of expression as a substantive political right.
Booked: Learning How to Be a Black Man in America, with Mychal Denzel Smith
An interview with Mychal Denzel Smith about his book, Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching, and why the language of universalism is not going to solve all of our problems.
Summer 2016
To access Dissent’s full Summer issue, please click here. This page is a placeholder.
Stuck in a Gilded Age
The U.S. economy has changed a lot since the 1970s—let alone the 1870s. But we are still stuck with old concepts for assessing it, and politics to match.
The Politics of Refugee Relief
As aid groups struggle to provide even basic services, refugees have turned to overt and contentious modes of resistance to shape their own lives. What do these protests tell us about our existing system of humanitarian response?
After Irony
Can affect theory help us understand our contemporary unease—and express our dreams for the future—without becoming a stand-in for the slow, hard work of politics?
