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Post-Hysterics: Zadie Smith and the Fiction of Austerity
The nineties were strange years. For a decade after history had purportedly “ended” a lot happened. The Soviet Union dissolved, seemingly in days and without a gunshot. A bloody war broke out between...
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The Mensch
One night last fall, eating my dinner somewhat hastily between an afternoon meeting and an evening meeting, I picked up the latest issue of Dissent (Winter 2013), opened it at random, and began...
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A Decent Leftist
A few months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Michael Walzer wrote an article for Dissent, “Can There Be a Decent Left?,” which made a number of American leftists rather mad. In it, Michael...
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The Forgotten Radical History of the March on Washington
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which occurred fifty years ago this August 28, remains one of the most successful mobilizations ever created by the American Left. Organized by a coalition...
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Between Dignity and Human Rights
Books and Articles Discussed in this Essay: Dignity: Its History and Meaning, by Michael Rosen (Harvard University Press, 2012) A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of...
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Open Letter to the Parties: Time for the Neo-Dissidents
No liberal democracy, political party, market economy, or human right is set in stone. People created these concepts, and people have the power to destroy them. These social constructs are often...
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Guest Workers As Bellwether
Guest workers are too often invisible in popular discussions of work; when they appear, it’s as outliers. But Saket Soni, who founded the National Guestworker Alliance amid the New Orleans’s...
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Land of Many Nationalisms
Increasingly, residents of the Chinese mainland, especially the middle-class urbanites who regularly go online, seek answers to questions like: Is it possible to be a Chinese patriot, while...
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Women’s Rights at Risk
A combination of factors in recent years has contributed to a fall in the status and material well-being of Chinese women relative to men. {…}
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Photo Essay: Consuming China
Despite being the “world’s manufacturer,” China has been moving toward a consumption-led economy. In this photo essay, Tong Lam looks at the consumer products and information that saturate everyday...
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When Humanitarianism Turns Realistic
Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed: The MSF Experience by Claire Magone, Michael Neuman, and Fabrice Weissman, eds. Columbia University Press, 2011, 250 pp. On March 19, 2011, French and British...
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Chinese Workers Foxconned
Delivering flexibility and scale at rock-bottom prices, Foxconn keeps pounding out the very real underpinnings of the New Economy, remaking global manufacturing in its own image. Foxconn stands as the...
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Post-Hysterics: Zadie Smith and the Fiction of Austerity
For Zadie Smith, the time had come for the radicalism of experiment and the realism of political economy—for a new social realism that was capable of capturing both the mechanics and experience of...
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Austerity and the Unraveling of European Universal Health Care
A great human disaster is now unfolding in the Eurozone countries that have agreed to slash spending, wages, and living standards. One facet of this story that has received too little attention is the...
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China’s Youth: Do They Dare to Care about Politics?
Young people in China are divorced from their country’s recent history. With no memory of Mao Zedong, they can glean little from a censored environment. Their parents, by and large, don’t talk about...
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Climate of Change: What Does an Inside-Outside Strategy Mean?
For those who believe that the arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice, it is comforting to see that bend reflected in the polls. Over time, as public awareness of an outrage...
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Mississippi Fever
River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom by Walter Johnson Belknap Press, 2013, 560 pp. This most impressive piece of history writing will be a source of inspiration and debate...
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Twin Tragedies
Two horrifying events occurred this spring that, at first, may seem to have nothing in common. In Bangladesh, more than a thousand garment workers died in the collapse of the Rana Plaza, a building...
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Climate Debt Denial
At the height of the Washington feeding frenzy about the fiscal cliff, the debt ceiling, and sequestration, austerity hawks coined a new label to denigrate lawmakers who were opposed to cutbacks...
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Reality Pawns: The New Money TV
Repo Games, one of the vilest reality shows in the history of American television, premiered on Spike in 2011 with no fanfare and a simple premise, delivered in a voiceover intro: “Nobody wants to meet...
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