Wednesday, March 13, the news broke and took practically everyone by surprise: Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, from Argentina, had been elected Pope. I was at home, standing at the bottom of the stairs, when I heard the news on television. I …
We are pleased to announce that in just a few weeks, Dissent will launch our first podcast, Belabored, with hosts Josh Eidelson and Sarah Jaffe. Josh and Sarah are among the finest labor journalists working today. And we hear they …
The decision to let this pipeline come through America is the most fateful decision you will ever make, Mr. President. It would be like jabbing a dirty needle into this country from Canada. It would be like lighting a fuse …
How Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities inspired PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan’s intellectual conversion.
Will the next pope embrace liberation theology? The conventional answer would be: fat chance. However, without going too far out on a limb, one could also answer in the affirmative. In their own ways, both responses will likely be correct. …
With Chuck Hagel confirmed as Secretary of Defense after a 58-41 vote on Tuesday—the tightest confirmation vote ever for a Pentagon chief, split almost exactly along partisan lines—the hubbub over Obama’s second-term cabinet appointments is beginning to subside. It’s been …
Jeffrey W. Rubin and Emma Sokoloff-Rubin, authors of Sustaining Activism: A Brazilian Women’s Movement and a Father-Daughter Collaboration (excerpted here in Dissent), will be speaking this Sunday, March 3 at 7 p.m. in New York City. The event will be …
Betty Friedan certainly deserves all the post-mortem attention she is receiving on the golden anniversary of the publication of The Feminine Mystique. No woman did more to spur the feminist awakening of the 1960s and 70s. If she were still alive, Friedan, …
As any follower of Marxist geographer David Harvey will eagerly tell you, boom-and-bust cycles are the cornerstone of “free” markets. Harvey’s writings since the financial crisis of 2008, including The Enigma of Capital and the essays republished in Rebel Cities, …
Ever since its inception, the legal and ethical parameters for the “War on Terror” have been murky. Should it be subject to the same legal framework as a “real” war? Recent revelations about U.S. drone warfare have brought the debate …
Last month the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released an exhaustive survey of U.S. Health Care in International Perspective, measuring the United States against sixteen peer countries (other high-income democracies) on a wide range of health outcomes. The results—summed up in …
Of the commercials that debuted at this year’s Super Bowl, one of the most talked about has been “Farmer,” a Dodge truck ad that pays tribute to the salt-of-the-earth middle Americans who work the land. (Check it out here if …
A series of recent articles have brought emotional labor into the spotlight as a fundamental component of today’s service economy, one rigorously enforced by employers and taxing on already strained service workers.
The idea that the privileged can “buy their way into college” has long been a cinematic cliché. While everyone seems to understand intuitively that the rich have an easier time getting into college than the poor, buying your way into …
Contrary to what everyone who loved—or hated—his inaugural address seems to think, President Obama has yet to demonstrate that he is determined to launch a new liberal era. The big speech did gesture in that direction. Obama declared, in the …
