Winter 2025

Two new online exclusives on private initiatives to reform higher education: James Dennis on the CUNY Pathways Initiative and Geoff Shullenberger on the rise of the MOOCs.

It is cliché now to say that we live in a “risk society.” We simultaneously celebrate “risk-takers” and blame those who undertake “risky speculations” without much pausing over the contradiction.

Walter Cronkite was at the center of a fascinating moment in the history of American mass media, and the television news that he came to embody was fleeting and highly unusual—an attempt to produce serious journalism in a medium associated with escapism.

The ban on medical marijuana in Washington, D.C. has been lifted. But for those caught in the cycle of poverty, addiction, and arrests, the drug war in the District is much the same as it ever was.

The individual acts of violence portrayed in Jai Bhim Comrade appear not as aberrations from a tolerant pluralism but as part of a continuum of persecution, which permeates India’s cities as much as its villages.

Some young feminists are becoming full-spectrum doulas. As Jennifer Baumgardner says, “if you’re placing a baby for adoption you need and deserve support, if you’re having an abortion you need and deserve support, and if you’re going to birth the baby and raise it you need and deserve support.”

In the most recent issue of Dissent, Carole Joffe looks at the legacy of Roe v. Wade. Read her piece, as well as comments by Linda Gordon, Zakiya Luna, and Ruth Rosen.

Much of what we now take for granted as common sense was once espoused by people who often were widely considered left-wing radicals.

On August 16 of last year, South African police shot dead thirty-four mineworkers at the Lonmin Platinum mine in Marikana. People in South Africa are referring to this as the “Marikana moment,” a turning point where the realities of South …

Here is the difficulty with drones: the technology is so good that the criteria for using it are likely to be steadily relaxed. That’s what seems to have happened with the U.S. Army or with the CIA in Pakistan and Yemen.