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.
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.
Why has the price tag of an American college degree skyrocketed (500 percent in the public sector since 1985) in recent decades?
We have reached the point where the satisfaction of material human needs no longer requires that every adult on the planet work a forty-hour week. The jobs are not coming back.
“You know those mothers who lift one-ton trucks off their babies?” says Jamie Fitzpatrick, a working-class mom (played Maggie Gyllenhall), in a confrontation with a corrupt union rep in Daniel Barnz’s edu-drama, Won’t Back Down. “They’re nothing compared to me.” …
The storied Sit-Down Strike in Flint, Michigan has a special significance for today. Led in large part by left-wingers—Communist, Socialist, and Trotskyist alike—it was, more important, the most dramatic part of a movement that swept across the nation. Not so …
The following is an exchange between Tim Barker, assistant editor at Dissent, and James Livingston, professor of history at Rutgers University and author, most recently, of Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture is Good for the Economy, the Environment, and Your …
Update (9/10): read Bill Barclay’s background on the strike here. Update (9/12): watch Dissent contributor and editorial board member Joanne Barkan discuss the strike on Al Jazeera English. After unsuccessful negotiations between Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union, …
The Haymarket Conspiracy: Transatlantic Anarchist Networks by Timothy Messer-Kruse University of Illinois Press, 2012, 256 pp. An impassive consideration of the Haymarket Affair might run as follows: On the evening of May 4, 1886, following several days of violent protests …
How Working America Works
Gordon/Cohen: Corporations & the Min. Wage
L. Quart: Putin’s Nightmare
E. Faue: Labor Justice, or Just-Us?
D. Plotke: OWS, Looking Back
