Barbaraj Fields News Today

Los Angeles occupies a near-mythic place in the American psyche. But a different kind of creative tradition has shaped it from the ground up.

The New York Times shows just how it's done.

“A simple racism/anti-racism framework,” Reed Jr. concludes, “isn’t adequate for making sense of the segregation era, and it certainly isn’t up to the task of interpreting what has succeeded it or challenging the forms of inequality and injustice that persist.”

“What about ‘O Pioneers!’ or ‘My Ántonia’?” asks the documentarian and author of the forthcoming photo book “Our America.” “For that matter, what about Gabriel García Márquez? We do not have a copyright on the word ‘American.’”

The political scientist recommends works by Tomasi di Lampedusa, Jonathan Haidt, and more

Loading... The president’s powers of clemency are wholly discretionary: He can use them as much or as little as he likes. President Trump’s pardons have been frequently controversial, but they have not been frequent overall. As of now, he has issued fewer pardons than any president in 100 years. (He may end up issuing more than George H.W. Bush did by January 20.) The pattern of his pardons and commutations is also unusual. Jack Goldsmith and Matthew Gluck have made some judgment calls i...

We spend many waking hours preparing for work, at work, or recovering from work, and many of us live in societies that, in the words of scholar Kathi Weeks, “expect people to work for wages.” In The transatlantic slave trade in the 1500s–1800s bound up capitalism with colonialism and racism. Slavery was progressively abolished starting in the late eighteenth century in Haiti and continued through the nineteenth century, but this did not bring an end to racial hierarchies or the entanglem...

(Rebecca Cook / Reuters) Have you had teachers who are big deals in your life? I’m sure you have, and so have I. I have been blessed with many. I write about two of them on the homepage today: here. The title of the piece: “Back to School.” (Yes, a Rodney Dangerfield movie.) The subheading: “A former student (very former) Zooms in with two beloved professors from his freshman year.” Advertisement Really? Really. Once more, I am learning from two of my favorite people, in whose classr...

Editors ▪ December 30, 2020 Cover illustrations by John Michael Snowden and Molly Crabapple We wanted to share some of our favorite articles from Dissent in 2020. In our first print issue this year, Democracy and Barbarism, Jedediah Britton-Purdy wove together the crises that had roiled American society long before the coronavirus, both in an article on carbon democracy cowritten with Alyssa Battistoni and a searching discussion with Aziz Rana. Our spring iss...