Bill McKibben’s recent writing leaves an impression of the author as a highly effective leader among leaders in the U.S. climate movement. The portrait seems credible. Why, then, is McKibben at pains to repudiate it?
Nicholas Dawidoff’s Collision Low Crossers will stand as its era’s exemplary document of how the National Football League is consumed. And he has used it to write a story almost all about the coaches.
Japan’s wide-ranging new Secrets Act imperils the central tenets of the country’s democracy—the right to know, the right to a free press, the right to privacy. For many, the broad possibilities of the new law evoke memories of the 1930s, an era known in Japan as the “Valley of Darkness.”
A history of Dissent magazine, by Maurice Isserman.
Socialist Kshama Sawant’s election to the Seattle City Council in November 2013 made national news, a kind of “man bites dog” story that the media found shocking and irresistible. In fact, the United States has a long tradition of municipal socialism. One hundred years ago, about 1,200 socialists held public office in 340 cities.
Diane Ravitch’s Reign of Error speaks directly to the experiences of public school teachers who are tired of being labeled as failures for their inability to control the outcomes of standardized tests.
Readers of Dissent are unlikely to be newcomers to Wisconsin’s recent political saga. With oddball events unfolding week by week, however, they may easily have lost track. American conservatives have not forgotten.
“Sixty-five years after its founding,” Ari Shavit writes in My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, “Israel has returned to its core questions. . . . Why Israel? What is Israel? Will Israel?” To answer these questions, he goes far beyond the occupation, touching on many issues that get to the core of Israeli identity.
What exactly did the recent Third Plenum reveal about Xi Jinping’s strategy for dealing with the big issues facing China in the nine years left in his time heading the Chinese Communist Party? Initially, the consensus seemed to be that …
In 1913, the Armory Show gave thousands of Americans their first glimpse of modern European painting. Now, in an exhibit entitled The Armory Show at 100: Modernism and Revolution, the New York Historical Society has made it possible for us to see what all the excitement was about.
As the still-unfolding revelations of NSA surveillance over virtually all of Americans’ telecommunications show, it is clear that privacy advocates have their work cut out for them. Two recent books decry the privacy violations but stop short of formulating workable ways to protect privacy interests.
Violence against gays and lesbians in Russia has never been as intense as it is today. The more politicians discuss implementing anti-gay laws, the more attacks occurred against sexual minorities. And Russia’s LGBT community is too weak to withstand this aggression.
Yossi Klein Halevi’s Like Dreamers tells the story of the members of the 55th Paratrooper Reserve Brigade, who played in securing Jerusalem during the Six Day War. From the peace movement to the settlements, the paths followed by the brigade’s veterans was a microcosm of Israel’s most intense schisms.
Evgeny Morozov and Jaron Lanier, themselves lapsed true believers in the Internet gospel, warn that the widespread and quasi-messianic enthusiasm for the Internet underwrites a technocratic agenda inimical to the survival of democracy. But their critiques never fully grapple with larger political and economic questions.
Technological innovation has been key to American military policy since 9/11, but it has by no means been the only driver of change. We might better view these years as a story of the U.S. national security apparatus gradually breaking free of the restraints imposed on it in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate. It is also a story of the military and intelligence wings of this apparatus becoming increasingly intertwined and indistinguishable from one another.
