Paperwork Against the People
For reactionaries of all stripes, complaining about the inefficiency and tyranny of clerks has long served as an excuse to call for both limited government and enhanced executive power.
Winter 2025
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Fishy Higher Ed Reforms
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.
The MOOC Revolution: A Sketchy Deal for Higher Education
Early on in the 2012 presidential campaign, the New York Times reported on Mitt Romney’s promotion of a for-profit Florida university called Full Sail. This advocacy, which seems to have helped Romney expand his donor base (the Times found that …
CUNY’s Pathways Initiative and the Future of Higher Education Reform
What began as a fight between English faculty and the administration at a small urban community college is quickly becoming the front line in a national struggle over the future of higher education. As of this writing, two of the …
The Risk Ownership Society
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.
The Most Trusted Man in America
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 District and the Drug War: The Triumph and Limits of Drug Reform
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.
Untouchable Voices: Resisting the Violence of Caste
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.
From the Other Side of the Speculum: New Fronts in the Fight for Reproductive Control
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.”
Roe v. Wade and Beyond
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.
Roe v. Wade and Beyond: Ruth Rosen Responds
On the day that Roe v. Wade was handed down, I felt a mixture of elation and panic. A new future loomed in which unwanted pregnancies would no longer send women to quacks, rushing them to hospitals with raging infections and perhaps to …
Roe v. Wade and Beyond: Zakiya Luna Responds
Lost opportunities: taken together, Carole Joffe and Akiba Solomon’s pieces can be read as cautionary tales about how not knowing our history can simultaneously doom us to repeat it—or not to recognize the role anyone of us can have in …
Roe v. Wade and Beyond: Linda Gordon Responds
As Carole Joffe writes in “Roe v. Wade and Beyond,” legal abortion was a great victory for health, for women’s citizenship, for families and children. But the continued attacks on abortion have been destructive on many grounds. One is universal: …
Listing Left
Much of what we now take for granted as common sense was once espoused by people who often were widely considered left-wing radicals.
After the Marikana Massacre: A Luta Continua
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 …
