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.
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 …
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 …
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: …
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.
Next time you hear a pundit say that to preserve America’s competitiveness or dynamism, we must replace the liberal arts with something more “practical,” take a second to check what they studied.
In a meeting between President Ronald Reagan and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, when the friends were both in high office, the president asked Mulroney, “Brian, did you read that article in the Reader’s Digest that trees cause pollution?”
Dissent contributors on Michigan’s right-to-work law: Colin Gordon looks at the faulty economics, Richard D. Kahlenberg and Moshe Z. Marvit tell the ugly racial history of the idea, and Michael Kazin reminds us why people would miss unions if they vanished.
Southern conservatives—including “right to work” progenitor and avowed white supremacist Vance Muse—feared that if unions united working-class whites and blacks, they could upend the Jim Crow order.
Dissent contributors reflect on the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. Read posts by Saul Cornell, Bryce Covert, and Elliott J. Gorn.
