“[T]raditional print critics claim the Internet has replaced expertise with amateurs, fanboys, and obscurantists,” writes Charles Taylor. “Web enthusiasts counter that we’re in a new golden age of film criticism and accuse the traditionalists of jealousy, resentment, and Ludditism. In other words: idealization of the past versus idealization of the present; resolution via what Pauline Kael once referred to as ‘saphead objectivity.’ Screw that.” (Image: Sabine Schostag, Wikimedia Commons, 2009)

“Like many brilliant artists, Guthrie was a mass of contradictions,” writes Zach Pontz. “He touted peace but sung often of war, he took a job as a radio host for Model Tobacco Company despite his contempt for capitalism, and though sympathetic to the plight of mankind he was known to act terribly toward his wives and was often absent as a father.” Despite all this, “with the recession-sparked social upheaval of the Occupy protests, America could use a Woody Guthrie or two.” (Image via Wiki. Com., Library of Congress, 1943)

The occupation of Zuccotti Park was cleared out early this morning. While the occupiers will face difficult decisions in the coming days, their recent adoption of a new, complementary governing body provides a useful tool to that end. Matthew Wolfe reports on the transition from the sole use of the general assembly—“both a soapbox and a chorus, a leaderless collective that is at once communal and individualistic”—to the adoption of the spokes council. (Image: General Assembly in Zuccotti Park; Bogieharmond, Flickr creative commons)

“Berlusconi’s fall was precipitated not by Italy’s center-left opposition, but by rebels within his own coalition desperate for a change of leadership,” writes Alexander Lee. “In allowing the 2010 budget report to pass without opposition, the Partito Democratico and its allies have illustrated that they lack a realistic alternative. With Italy staring financial oblivion in the face, this is cause for real concern.” (Image: Barb Mayer, 2011, Flickr cc)

“[T]o what extent are we protecting women’s ‘freedom,’ ‘choice,’ or ‘autonomy’ when we focus on abortion as a right in the absence of other social protections for women and families: subsidized day care, job security, a family wage, quality public education, and universal health care?” asks Amy Borovoy. “The discourse of ‘choice’ alone has not provided a sustaining moral framework for handling the necessity of abortion, which will always be a final recourse.” (Image: Paul-W, 2011, Flickr creative commons)

“In 1959, at a time of violent unrest among American youth, a publisher commissioned a study of juvenile delinquency from Paul Goodman,” writes Horatio Morpurgo. “The resulting volume, Growing up Absurd, was an immediate if unlikely success...[F]ifty years on he is once again unknown. But to reread his book in the aftermath of this summer’s riots in Britain is to be visited by uneasy feelings.” (Image: Fire at a store during riots in London in August; Andy Armstrong, Wiki. Com.)

“On October 1 the state of California launched a much-anticipated plan to ‘realign’ the state’s criminal justice system,” writes Elliott Currie. The program “has been ballyhooed by its promoters as nothing less than a ‘revolution’ in criminal justice.” But it “will leave intact a crisis of crime and punishment that is much more entrenched and much more severe than current rhetoric suggests.” (Image: California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo; MrPlow5, Flickr cc, 2011)

“Progressives and mainstream Democratic pundits disagree with each other about many issues at the heart of the Occupy Wall Street protests,” writes Danny Goldberg, “but with few exceptions they are joined in their contempt for drum circles, free hugs, and other behavior in Zuccotti Park that smacks of hippie culture....Yet it is precisely the mystical utopian energy that most professional progressives so smugly dismiss that has aroused a salient, mass political consciousness on economic issues.” (Image: Woodstock, 1969; Wikimedia Commons)

“Occupy Wall Street is well on its way to becoming the first major populist movement on the U.S. left since the 1930s,” write Joe Lowndes and Dorian Warren. But it is “better historically situated to take on issues of exclusion” than other populist uprisings in American history. Read more Occupy Wall Street coverage here. (Image: David Shankbone, Flickr creative commons, 10/6/11)

Dissent has asked a number of organizing scholars and practitioners--James DeFilippis, Robert Fisher, Eric Shragge, Randy Shaw, David Walls, and Erik Peterson--to comment on Zelda Bronstein’s “Politics’ Fatal Therapeutic Turn” from the Summer 2011 issue of Dissent. For the first time in years, many see potential for a remobilization of the American Left. We hope that these arguments will help carry forward discussions about where (and how) to go from here. (Image: S. Brunn, Flickr, 2010)

From Dissent's coverage of Occupy Wall Street: “[M]ove beyond the park and meet the rest of the 99 percent where they’re at.” “[T]he emergence of something like OWS was predictable, at least in retrospect, after the failure of its predecessor, Obama-mania.” “OWS is giving people the opportunity to identify with a national struggle while advancing causes relevant to their local communities.” “The recurrent theme was that politics was of, for, and by corporate America and that this movement represented an alternative to that.” “Bring tarps.” (Image: Assembly in Washington Square, 10/8/11; D. Shankbone, Wiki. Com.)

“Whereas Franklin Roosevelt attacked the 'economic royalists' and built and mobilized his political base, Obama entered office with an already organized base and largely ignored it,” writes Gar Alperovitz. “When the next financial crisis occurs, and it will, a different political opportunity may be possible....[A] long era of social and economic austerity and failing reform might paradoxically open the way to more populist or radical institutional change.” (Image: David Shankbone, 9/28/11, Flickr cc)

Dissent inaugurates a series of Marine Lieutenant Sam Jacobson's diaries from Afghanistan. “I ran into an old acquaintance of mine from training, who was going home with 1/6. I thought I knew what he had been through. And he knew I thought I knew what he had been through. I told him I was heading out on an embedded training team. He shook his head; told me to be careful and to trust nobody. I agreed.” (Image: U.S. Marine Corps, 2010, Flickr creative commons)

Richard White's “larger target” in his new history of the transcontinental railroad “is the romance of growth through capitalist enterprise,” writes Gary Gerstle, “always a strong element in American life and utterly dominant since the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s...He sees a direct connection between the railroad scandals of the nineteenth century and the dot.com and Wall Street scandals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.” (Image: Workmen laying track; Library of Congress)

“The demise of the Qaddafi regime represents a new phenomenon in the now protracted Arab Spring, following the nonviolent protests that brought down Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt this winter,” writes Ariel I. Ahram. “Libya’s path could be a harbinger of things to come for countries like Syria and Yemen, where unrest occurs in the context of pronounced societal cleavages and more fragile states apparatuses.” (Image: tally on September 9 in Tripoli; Ammar Abd Rabbo, Flickr cc)

Dissent presents the third installment of its series “Party of the Future: Voices from the Millennial Generation,” on young Americans abroad. “Our seven did not arrive on foreign shores carrying unearned confidence,” writes Nicolaus Mills. “Whether they went abroad in the role of visitor, soldier, reporter, or Peace Corps volunteer, they did everything they could to avoid being viewed as Ugly Americans who respect neither the language nor the culture of the country they are in.” (Image: Alexander Chaikin, Shutterstock)

The editors of Dissent have asked some of our contributors for their reflections on what has changed in the ten years since the attacks of September 11. With responses from Mitchell Cohen, Michael Kazin, Sarah Leonard, Nicolaus Mills, Feisal G. Mohamed, James B. Rule, Nick Serpe, Greg Smithsimon, and Bhaskar Sunkara. (Image: ccho, 2009, Flickr creative commons)

The “‘abolitionist approach’ to child labor represents mainstream institutional and political thought about how best to protect the world’s children from economic exploitation,” writes Neil Howard. “But the evidence suggests that it doesn’t work.” Child workers and their families are “caught between the structural injustice that hollows out their incomes and well-meaning but misguided campaigns that prevent them from doing anything about it.” (Children miners in the Congo; ENOUGH Project, 2009, Flickr cc)

Legislative bans on Sharia have passed or are under consideration in a number of states. But while Sharia is used to justify draconian punishments and misogyny in other countries, it “does not mean the same thing when it appears, for example, in the text of a Texas marriage contract,” writes Rafia Zakaria. “Those who refuse to separate out such cases hold entire communities responsible for the political machinations of distant actors whose use of Sharia may share only scant resemblances with its use in the United States.”

In New York City, “old-guard Democrats over the last few decades have settled into backroom fiefdoms that continue to wield an immense amount of political clout, albeit behind the scenes,” writes Nick Juravich. In Brooklyn, they are now challenged by the reformist New Kings Democrats. “They want that machine to work, even if it never has before.” (Image: Boss Tweed on a tobacco label, 1869, Library of Congress)