• L. Quart: A Realist Fairy Tale
• J.T. Snyder: Our Town, Vallejo
• N. Buccola: The Progressive Douglass
• L. Quart: Triumph of the 1 Percent
• P. Richards: A Year in Grenoble
• Black Politics and the Establishment
• Indignado"> Indignado Image" /> Interview with an Indignado
• Ari Phillips: Atmosphere of Concern
• P. Dreier: Is Capitalism on Trial?

James Thomas Snyder

Mare Island was the oldest naval base on the West Coast until its closure in 1996, writes James Thomas Snyder. I have been surprised to find this detail missing from recent reporting about Vallejo. When Mare Island closed, 25,000 jobs disappeared and $500 million in annual income evaporated from the community....[T]he federal government was Vallejos economic dynamo. The city never really recovered. (Photo: Mare Island, by eeetthaannn, 2009, via Flickr creative commons)

Nicholas Buccola

To the chagrin of many progressives, a number of scholars and public officials claim that [Frederick] Douglasss political philosophy lives on in the ideas of contemporary conservatives, writes Nicholas Buccola. But while his rhetoric was sometimes individualist, it was always coupled with sensitivity to circumstances. In certain contexts, he believed, a simple pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps philosophy was woefully inadequate. (Photo: Douglass c. 1866, Collection of the New York Historical Society, via Wikimedia Commons)

Phillip M. Richards

Phillip M. Richards decided to teach for a year in France to confront the realities of race and higher education in the United States "in a less mystified academic and intellectual world." But at L'Universit Stendhal, the real meaning of the word Francophonie became clear: "it was the colonial French world deployed around a cosmopolitan French center." (Photo: Stendhal University, by Osbornb via Flickr creative commons)

Rakim Brooks & Charles E. Cobb, Jr.

Rakim Brooks interviews Charles E. Cobb, Jr., a former field organizer for SNCC. We did the patient, even boring, day-to-day work of sitting on porches talking to people amid a lot of fear....You had to sit down and talk to people, give them a chance to judge you, to know you, because they were going to be putting their lives, their jobs, and their families at risk....This raises one of the weaknesses of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The best protection against being absorbed by the establishment against ones will is deep roots in the community. (Photo: Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation at the 1964 DNC; LoC, Wiki Com)

Baptist Brossard and Jos Luis Moreno Pestaa

The Indignados of Spain, whose movement has nothing to do with traditional strikes and union marches, or ordinary political demonstrations, left more than a few thinkers out of conceptual gas, writes Baptist Brossard. Once we admit, however, the Indignadoss attention to the maintenance of internal discipline...their inscription in local communities...and the way they set out to have rational discussions, we end up pretty far from the usual clichs about the Left. (Photo: Indignado assembly, by M. Martin Vicente, 2011, via Flickr cc)

Bhaskar Sunkara

Is the Black Bloc a cancer on Occupy, as Chris Hedges recently put it? [A]s encampment after encampment is dismantled, writes Bhaskar Sunkara, reaching new constituents and getting more people actively involved will be more important than ever....But we dont need to excise people from Occupy, we just need to grow it. And I remain unconvinced that anarchists are in any significant way preventing this growth, though they are a convenient scapegoat for more fundamental failings. (Photo by Florian Bausch, 2011, via Wikimedia Commons)

Rafia Zakaria

Dissent presents Rafia Zakarias Pakistan Diary, on the lives of women in Karachi. The mosques in the city, sometimes more than one on a single city block, are festooned with lights on their domed outsides. The inside, to me and to almost all the women at the airport, rich or poor or thin or fat or veiled or unveiled, is a mystery. Women do not go inside mosques in Pakistan; they pray at home. (Photo: girls at a school in Karachi; UN Photo, via Flickr creative commons)

Ari Phillips

Japan had planned to increase its nuclear power production from 30 to 50 percent of domestic power over the next thirty years. That plan has gone with the radioactive wind, writes Ari Phillips. Theres no easy route out of the energy fix in Japan, let alone the global crisis of climate change....At [the Institute for Global Environmental Strategy] researchers are working feverishly to address these challenges domestically, while onlookers await the course of action Japan will pursue as it emerges from this tumultuous period. (Photo: IGES building in Hayama, Japan, courtesy of the author)

Peter Dreier

[N]owhere can the impact of the Occupy insurgency be better seen than in the fumbling efforts of Romneys GOP rivals to capture the new anti-corporate sentiment, writes Peter Dreier. The Republicans are trying to figure out how to tap into the national mood without sounding too anti-business and offending their corporate sponsors. Theyre finding that its a difficult tightrope to walk. (Photo by David Shankbone, 2011, via Flickr creative commons)

Franklin Strier

Franklin Strier argues that the Roberts Courts Hosanna-Tabor decision last week fits into a broader pattern of expanding the authority of religious institutions. While the Court can superficially dilute its activism by characterizing these de facto overrules as distinctions, it cannot change its results-orientation. Results speak for themselves. (Image via noclip at Wikimedia Commons, 2008)

Max Fraser

Ever since Muncie was christened Middletown in 1929, journalists, academics, and presidential hopefuls have flocked to this blue-collar city in eastern Indiana, for a look into the petri dish of American life or simply some Joe-the-Plumber-style street cred, writes Max Fraser. But the very idea of Middletown now seemed a pale shadow of present realities, as the stark prose of unemployment statistics and eviction notices inscribed a very different kind of story onto the lives of millions of Americans. (Image: abandoned factory in Muncie, IN; sungo, Flickr creative commons, 2009)

Jeremiah Riemer

The real divide in Europe now, writes Jeremiah Riemer, is about the political culture of regulation and crisis management. Its a minor fissure across the Rhine, between the different administrative styles at loggerheads in the Franco-German duo that dominates the eurozone. The gap is larger between the northern countries, which have independent civil services and clean government... and the southern countries, where patronage and tax evasion are traditional and widespread. (Image: Sebastian Zwez, 2009, Wikimedia Commons)

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

Atossa Abrahamian on the Freelancers Union: [H]ow does one organize a workforce that is, by definition, unaffiliated? Where do you find members, if not in assembly lines or hiring halls? How do you hold your employers accountable and make yourself visible to government when you cannot strike? And isnt a freelancers union, in all its individualistic self-organization, the ultimate oxymoron? (Joel Washing, Flickr creative commons, 2007)

Matt Pearce

Matt Pearce spent ten days on Tahrir Square, leading up to Egypt's first election since the January revolution. It seemed that Tahrir was not actually the beating, democratic heart at the center of the country, but a kind of recurring dream whose symbols and figures were losing their mystique for Egyptians over time. (Photo courtesy of the author.)

Jake Blumgart

Jake Blumgart interviews Balzs Nagy-Navarro, who has been leading a hunger strike by members of the media in protest of Hungary's new restrictions on press freedom. They put down a rope with a sound box and it plays the same three songs, all day long....[W]e realized it was music just to annoy, just to disturb us. At first it was just on the news desk balcony. But now they have put it in a closed box and they have two guys almost guarding it. They said it was under the instruction of the CEO of the company. You can now understand the reality of the absurd tragicomedy that is going on here.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom

What's happening in Wukan? Jeffrey Wasserstrom interviews Rachel Beitare, a journalist on the ground in the Chinese town in revolt. [T]he villages situation encapsulates almost all of the big issues that trouble Chinese society: rural poverty vs. rapid development, unchecked power, growing economic gaps, environmental degradation, corruption, official violence, the balance of power between Beijing and the provincesits all there. (Photo by Helen Lee, via Google Plus)

Eric Reeves

In the border regions of Sudan, writes Eric Reeves, we are witnessing a ghastly reprise of the conduct that has defined Khartoums brutal military control of its restless peripheries for decades.... [J]ust as the regime has turned Darfur into a black box, from which no honest accounts can emerge, so too has it drawn a veil over its actions in Blue Nile, South Kordofan, and Abyei. (Image: UN photo of Abyei after northern attack, Flickr cc)

George Sterzinger

The Republicans have concluded that the failure of Solyndra proves that the government shouldnt pick winners or try to act as a venture capitalist, writes George Sterzinger. But the United States must find ways to support innovation in energy technologies that carry environmental benefits. The loan guarantee program is one way to do that. (Photo by Lawrence Jackson, White House, Wikimedia Commons, 2011)

Leonard Quart

A Dangerous Method "is filled with literate dialogue" between Freud and Jung, writes Leonard Quart, "keeping under control David Cronenberg's more anarchic visual imagination." The film "looks more like a well-mounted, decorous, and sometimes static Masterpiece Theater production."

Feisal G. Mohamed

The first round of the Egyptian parliamentary elections is over, and the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Freedom and Justice Party has come out on top. The FJPs inevitable missteps in the new parliament might make Egyptians look elsewhere in the future, writes Feisal G. Mohamed. One can only hope that they will look left rather than right, and that organized and competent parties will be waiting there to greet them. Now with an update following the run-off elections. (Photo by Mosa'ab Elshamy, via Flickr creative commons)