Some questions are really not worth asking, even as they nag. What relationship should American intellectuals have toward mass culture: television, films, mass-market books, popular music, and the Internet may be one of them. Before answering it, let me first …
Spoiler alert: This piece gives away key plot details about Inglourious Basterds. Quentin Tarantino’s Second World War adventure, like Bonnie and Clyde, is a distillation of the movies, tall tales, and shared legends that color our view of the past. …
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. …
The online journal Democratiya launched in 2005. Sixteen issues, one book, and a quarter-million readers later, Democratiya is being incorporated into Dissent. Why? Well, when Dwight Macdonald closed Politics, his “one-man magazine,” in 1949, he cited the relentless demands of …
Coming of age during the Vietnam War, I cut my cultural teeth on an exalted idea of intellectuals. They were the people who challenged the official pieties, especially the easy equation of power and virtue, the American civil religion that …
Communism has lost its capacity to inspire the Chinese. But what will replace it? And what should replace it? Clearly, there is a need for a new moral foundation for political rule in China, and the government has moved closer …
The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience by Kirstin Downey Random House, 2009, 480 pp. $35 As the nation debates once again proposals to guarantee health insurance for …
One of the questions that we posed for the forum on intellectuals and their America in this issue has preoccupied me for many years, and I will seize this occasion to respond (other editors may also join the conversation on …
Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression by Morris Dickstein Norton, 2009, 598 pp., $29.95 Need it be said we live in gloomy times? The most optimistic among our commentariat talk of a jobless recovery: the …
I’m not qualified to answer question two, so consider this a response to the other three questions. Internet, film, television, and popular music are rather broad categories, each containing nutritious wheat and faddish chaff. By “television,” do we mean The …
In Defense of Lost Causes by Slavoj Žižek Verso, 2008, 504 pp., $34.95 In a stream of writings and talks since 1989, the Slovenian social theorist Slavoj Žižek has blended Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegelian philosophy with film criticism, cultural studies, …
It is a difficult time for a rational defense of religion. Because for most of my life I thought of myself as an atheist (and in certain moods still do), I never imagined that I would find myself a defender. …
Europe is suffering from its highest level of unemployment in more than a generation, and European social democrats have been unable to formulate an effective political response. One in ten of Europe’s workers are without paid work. The number amounts …
Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist, godfather of microcredit, and founder of the now-famous Grameen Bank, enchants many different types of people with his imaginings of a better future. A popular public speaker, Yunus is a relatively short man with a …
The recession that started in December 2007 was already in its ninth month when a tumultuous ten days in September 2008 shook the world. First the U.S. government nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; then the investment banking house Merrill …
