Jesse Larner sounds a shrill alarm in his broadside against hate crime laws (“Hate Crime/Thought Crime,” Spring 2010), raising a variety of seemingly dire libertarian, First Amendment, and slippery-slope arguments. Yet, despite the fact that federal and state hate crime …
In the field of performance art, Marina Abramović is a legend, and her recently concluded six-week show, Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, has been a turning point in giving performance …
Early in the morning of June 28, 2009, the president of Honduras, Manuel “Mel” Zelaya, was rousted out of his bed by soldiers and sent out of the country in his pajamas. It was an old-fashioned coup d’état, evoking, seemingly, …
The idea of the nation-state is in a grip of two pictures: first, the nation as an extended family; and second, its territory as home. The nation as an extended family is a metaphor for an ethnic nation, whereas a …
Michael Foot, who died on March 3, 2010, at the age of ninety-six, was the soul of the democratic Left in England. His political engagements started in the late 1930s, with editorials against the appeasement policy of Neville Chamberlain and …
Against the background of Barack Obama’s attempt to defend the idea of “two states for two peoples” in Israel/Palestine, consider a recent talk given by the Palestinian Sufian Abu-Zayda. Abu-Zayda is fifty years old. He was born in the Jabalya …
The New Old Europe by Perry Anderson Verso, 2009, 548pp., $39.95 When the history of the present era is written, it will be interesting to see which institutions, ideologies, and reputations survive the Great Recession of 2008. Some casualties are …
The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009, 496 pp., $29.95 Rescuing Justice and Equality by G.A. Cohen Harvard University Press, 2008, 448pp., $47.50 Contemporary political philosophy starts from John Rawls’s theory of justice. …
Death by Gender Editors: I am more than a little perturbed at the headlining of my article “Death By Gender” on the cover of the Spring Dissent. “Honor killings” as a category is not a “feminist” issue (which many readers …
Last fall, we invited a number of prominent American intellectuals who are not editors of Dissent to participate in a forum about the culture and politics of our country. It seems a good time for such a discussion. Both U.S. …
Tree Spiker: From Earth First! To Lowbagging: My Struggles in Radical Environmental Action by Mike Roselle with Josh Mahan St. Martin’s Press, 2009, 272 pp., $24.99 Operation Bite Back: Rod Coronado’s War to Save America’s Wilderness by Dean Kuipers Bloomsbury, …
Edward wasn’t doing his work. I had given the twelfth graders in my summer school class the following writing assignment: “Have you ever done something that you regretted or that made you feel guilty?” We were reading John Knowles’s A …
The editors’ question about how intellectuals should “participate in American politics” highlights (for me, at least) how the meaning of the word “intellectual” has expanded since 1952, when the editors of Partisan Review organized the famous symposium that has inspired …
What has happened to Craig Becker illustrates why progressives are disappointed by the first year of the Obama administration—and why they should not stop supporting it. A year ago, Obama nominated Becker, a distinguished lawyer who has worked for the …
How does a young acolyte of the secular Left find his way to divinity school? There are times when, walking to my “Introduction to the New Testament” class in the cold Chicago morning, I ask myself that question. Part of …
