Our friends at Dissent have started their own group blog. They call it ”Arguing the World”; David Marcus, their online editor, explains why:

“Arguing the World” takes its name from Joseph Dorman’s documentary about four young radicals who gathered in a City College cafeteria to debate politics and literature. One of them was Irving Howe, who became a founding editor of Dissent; the others—Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, and Nathan Glazer—went on to edit the Public Interest. Each went his own political direction—Bell once quipped that he was a “liberal in politics, a conservative in culture, and a socialist in economics”—but taken together they represented a particular way of thinking, and arguing, and worrying, out loud.

The posts on “Arguing the World” will follow in this style. They will not have the honed polish of our print and Web articles but will capture a particular mode of thinking and arguing out loud. We will have short musings on literature and film, riffs on politics on both sides of the Atlantic and the Pacific, critiques and celebrations and close readings of articles found in our own pages and elsewhere. “Arguing the World” will be a place of conversation: an argument among friends and colleagues, and an argument with the world, over the direction of contemporary politics and culture.

Among the contributors to “Arguing the World” are Michael Walzer, Richard Wolin, David Bromwich, Alan Johnson, and Todd Gitlin. So far, most of the posts have been very short, well written essays — too short for print, but more substantial and less link-locked than most blog posts. Lots of dissent, little snark.