Aviva Chomsky: What’s at stake in the border debate
The militarization of the police has been underway since 9/11, but only in the aftermath of the six-shot killing of an unarmed teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, with photos of streets in a St. Louis...
View ArticleAnya Schiffrin: Who knew we were living in the golden age of investigative...
Almost a decade ago, I spent more than a year freelancing for a major metropolitan newspaper — one of the biggest in the country. I would, on an intermittent basis, work out of a newsroom that appeared...
View ArticleMichael Klare: Oil rush in America
Whatever you may imagine, “peak oil” has not been discredited as a concept, a statement no less true for “peak fossil fuels.” Think of them instead as postponed. We are, after all, on a finite planet...
View ArticleNick Turse: American monuments to failure in Africa?
In light of recent history, perhaps it’s time to update that classic U.S. Army recruitment campaign slogan from “be all that you can be” to “build all that you can build.” Consider it an irony that,...
View ArticleNoam Chomsky: The fate of the Gaza ceasefire
Is there nowhere on the face of the Earth where opinion polls aren’t taken? In the wake of the 50-day Israeli assault on Gaza, parts of that tiny strip of land now look, according to photographs, like...
View ArticleSteve Fraser: The return of the titans
Think of this as the year that democracy of, by, and for the billionaires shall not perish from the Earth — not when we’re on a new electoral playing field in a political world in which distinctions...
View ArticleBautista, Crisp-Sauray, and McKibben: A future to march for
[Next Sunday’s event in New York City is already being pre-billed as “the largest climate change demonstration in history.” (It doesn’t actually have that much competition.) My hope is that anyone who...
View ArticleTom Engelhardt: The great concentration or the great fragmentation?
Power drain: Mysteries of the twenty-first century in a helter-skelter worldBy Tom Engelhardt It’s possible I’ve lived most of my life on the wrong planet — and if that sounds like the first sentence...
View ArticleRebecca Solnit: What to do when you’re running out of time
Just when no one needed more lousy news, the U.N.’s weather outfit, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), issued its annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin. It offered a shocking climate-change update:...
View ArticleTaylor and Appel: The subprime education scandal
We used to hear more often about those malignant institutions serving, or rather plaguing, the poor: the loan sharks who charged 100% or more per year in interest, the furniture or radios that ended up...
View ArticlePeter Van Buren: Back to the future in Iraq
On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King delivered a speech at Riverside Church in New York City titled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” In it, he went after the war of that moment and the money...
View ArticleNick Turse: American ‘success’ and the rise of West African piracy
As American hysteria over events in the Middle East rises, news about whatever grim video the Islamic State (IS) has just released jostles for attention with U.S. bombing runs in Iraq, prospective ones...
View ArticleWilliam deBuys: Love affair in the back country
Without visiting it, the eighteenth-century French natural scientist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, propounded the theory that the New World was an inferior creation, its species but...
View ArticleTom Engelhardt: Entering the intelligence labyrinth
Failure is success: How American intelligence works in the twenty-first centuryBy Tom Engelhardt What are the odds? You put about $68 billion annually into a maze of 17 major intelligence outfits. You...
View ArticleTodd Gitlin: As the globe warms, so does the climate movement
Don’t call it a “march.” It was a “stand” — and a first stand at that, not a last one. The People’s Climate March, billed as the largest climate demonstration in history, more than exceeded...
View ArticleMichael Klare: Washington wields the oil weapon
You remember. It was the oiliest of administrations. The president was a (failed) West Texas oilman. The vice-president had been the CEO of the giant oil field services company, Halliburton, and before...
View ArticleLaura Gottesdiener: Adrift in oil country
Think of it as a Walrusgram written on the sand of a northwest Alaskan beach and sent to the planet. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Arctic marine mammal aerial survey noticed...
View ArticleRory Fanning: Why do we keep thanking the troops?
More than a few times I’ve found myself in a crowd of Vietnam veterans, and more than a few times at least one of them was wearing a curious blue or yellow t-shirt. Once that shirt undoubtedly fit a...
View ArticleStuds Terkel on death and forgiveness in America
Studs Terkel, who put oral history on the American map with one spectacular book after another, was a small man who had a knack for making everyone around him feel larger than life. He taught me the...
View ArticleAnn Jones: The missing women of Afghanistan
From the beginning, it was to be “Russia’s Vietnam.” First the administration of President Jimmy Carter, then that of President Ronald Reagan was determined to give the Soviet Union a taste of what...
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