Fall 2025

I’m still puzzled fifty years later by what it was about the climate and the culture in 1960 that encouraged many young people to think they could make the world over. That was the year when little groups of black …

In general, I’m not a big fan of leaders in Latin America eliminating or loosening term limits so that they can stay in office longer. I also believe that recent processes of constitutional reform in many Latin American countries have …

More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City by William Julius Wilson W.W. Norton, 2009, 190 pp., $24.95 The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today by Andrew J. Cherlin Knopf, 2009, …

Hitch 22: A Memoir by Christopher Hitchens Twelve/Hachette Book Group, 2010 448 pp., $26.99 HAS THERE ever been anyone quite like Christopher Hitchens? As a writer and a thinker, Hitchens may be the greatest performance artist the profession has ever …

“DON’T FORGET your cape,” my brother gibed on the phone. “Will the workshops be at night?” a colleague chortled. “Is this like a Star Trek convention?” asked a bewildered friend as I prepared to leave for the biannual conference devoted …

An old conservative-minded contention goes something like this: if you start with an egalitarian ethos, you will bottom out at complete leveling. It’s a slippery slope to the end of individuality. This was not simply a social or economic claim. …

Danny Rubinstein’s account, in his Summer 2010 Dissent article (“One State/Two States: Rethinking Israel and Palestine”), of the disdainful reaction of Sufyan Abu-Zayda, a prominent figure in the Palestinian Authority, to Benjamin Netanyahu’s “Bar-Ilan speech,” in which the right-wing prime …

When I became director of the undergraduate Urban Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania in 1983, I was surprised to find that it lacked a multidisciplinary course that aimed to provide a coherent interpretation of contemporary urban America. What …

When bank robber Willie Sutton was asked, “Why do you rob banks?” he reportedly responded, “Because that’s where the money is.” Progressives should keep this insight in mind.

Theatre by David Mamet Faber and Faber, 2010, 157 pp., $22 Here is a fact beyond dispute: David Mamet is the most visible and widely respected American playwright of the last quarter-century. His acid-tongued dramas of the 1980s, which zeroed …