Kenneth Lonergan may be a relative novice as a film director, but he knows that high art, at its best, subverts the ground of our psychological or political being. Margaret is a film that makes no attempt to soothe its audience.
The United States is confronted with numerous threats to its economic well-being and security. The national debt is not one of them. The real challenges of our time are massive joblessness and the decrepit state of American infrastructure.
The cycle of debt illustrates that we cannot fix the problem through austerity. This tactic only deepens the devastation, since low wages further erode the tax base for cities, leaving them vulnerable to predatory lenders.
Strike Debt holds that debtors can unite and fight for a fair economy, liberating us from medical, housing, education, and credit card debt. But why organize around debt, rather than class, occupation, or grievance? A debate on the Rolling Jubilee.
Election responses from Tim Barker and Sarah Leonard, David Bromwich, Mark Engler, Max Fraser, Ryan Rafaty, Rafia Zakaria, Kevin Mattson, Gary Gerstle, and Benjamin Ross.
Now, the next phase of a 99 percent movement needs to get—and keep—busy. Why do I say “next phase”? Because the Occupy movement that came about in 2011 has accomplished just about as much of its mission as possible.
Lawrence Summers’s celebration of the global reach of English can only be read as an unabashed apology for American empire. By even the most strategically hard-headed criteria, however, cadres drawn from a monolingual American elite are a poor choice as ambassadors of U.S. interests.
P.T. Anderson is less interested in structures and institutions than in the psychological and archetypal nature of his bigger-than-life, sometimes mad characters. And so his latest film, The Master, isn’t the docudrama about a Scientology-like cult that some people expected it to be.
Four years ago on the embargo-stricken island, Obama’s election fueled a wave of optimism for improved relations between the two countries, a development that some see as a necessary step to improving life on the island.
Intense tropical cyclones would presumably have formed in the absence of the current warming of the oceans by the greenhouse effect. Maybe Sandy would have been one of those. But the fact is that Sandy is not one of those.
If graduate students like myself do not want to come into work one day to find ourselves replaced by video lectures delivered by “information curators,” we will have to learn to take collective action.
It is not just the economic climate in which our colleges and universities find themselves that determines what they charge and how they operate; it is their increasing corporatization.
When Mitt Romney urges Americans to “get as much education as they can afford,” or when university administrators call the police as their first response to student protest, it’s Ronald Reagan’s playbook they’re working from.
His commentary was sharp, as much of Dissent is, but I always imagined him writing with a smile on his face, while many of our other writers write with grim determination.
My own education in American social policy began intensively in 1980. That year, three events cemented my interest in American poverty and the U.S. public response to it.
