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Robert Reich: The Stock Market Rally Versus the World's Economic Fundamentals
The stock market has as much to do with the real economy as the weather has to do with geology. Day by day there’s no relationship at all. Over time, weather and geology interact but the results aren’t evident for many years.
September 2010 -
Builder Levy: Remembering the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
In this post, a photographer recounts the events of August 28, 1963 and shares a photo he took at the March on Washington.
September 2010 -
Norman Solomon: A Speech for Endless War
On the last night of August, the president used an Oval Office speech to boost a policy of perpetual war. With his commitment to war in Afghanistan, President Obama is not only on the wrong side of history. He is also now propagating an exculpatory view of any and all U.S. war efforts.
September 2010 -
Guernica to Publish Winner of the ILP International Literature Award
Two years ago, the Secretary of the Swedish Academy that decides the Nobel Prize claimed that American literature had become too insular. The folks at ILP and Guernica are looking for any work that “broadens the landscape of North American literature outside of the borders of North America” to negate these charges of insularity.
September 2010 -
Robert Reich: Why A Civil Society Extends Unemployment Benefits
With the economy so bad that the social fabric is coming undone, it is to the nation’s credit that many of the unemployed are receiving benefits.
September 2010 -
David Bollier: The Founders as Mashup Mavens: Lewis Hyde Reveals How Knowledge and Culture are a Shared Legacy.
Lewis Hyde’s book is a work of political history, legal scholarship, and a meditation on the commerce of the human spirit and creativity.
August 2010 -
Guernica Writer Heidi Cullen on the Colbert Report
On August 25th, one of Guernica’s featured writers, Heidi Cullen, was the guest on the Colbert Report, where she discussed her book The Weather of the Future and was asked to “refrighten” Colbert about climate change.
August 2010 -
Jay Walljasper: In Tough Times, Parks are a Smart Investment
In St. Louis, Detroit, and Houston, new parks foster economic opportunities and prove that investing in public space is a boost on local budgets.
August 2010 -
Erica Wright: Top 5 Unnecessary Remakes
With two superfluous remakes soon to make their way to a theater near you, Wright takes a look at the top five movies that did not need do-overs.
August 2010 -
Andrew J. Bacevich: The Unmaking of a Company Man: An Education Begun in the Shadow of the Brandenburg Gate
Bacevich, a former military officer, discusses the moment twenty years ago when he realized orthodoxy is a sham and how the education of that epiphany forced him to reexamine the rules of Washington.
August 2010 -
Subhankar Banerjee: Could This Be A Crime?: U.S. Climate Bill Is Dead While So Much Life On Our Earth Continues To Perish
As trees in and around Santa Fe rapidly die due to a bark beetle invasion, the author of this post asks, “Will the economic-and-comfort-needs of our species always trump the survival-needs of all other species that also inhabit this Earth?”
August 2010 -
David Bollier: The Privatization of Yoga
The sooner we acknowledge that we live in the Age of Enclosure, the sooner we can develop the legal mechanisms for protecting that which belongs to all of us. This includes the latest endangered resource: yoga.
August 2010 -
Robert Reich: Tax Jujitsu: Why Democrats Should Propose a “People’s Tax Cut”
Republicans are calling the Democrat’s proposal to end the Bush tax cuts on the richest 3 percent a “tax increase,” and demagoging that it will hurt the economy and small business. This is baloney, to put it politely.
August 2010 -
Charles Euchner: Excerpt: Roy Wilkins’s Reluctant Tribute to W.E.B. Du Bois
In this excerpt, Roy Wilkins, a civil rights activist determined to live within the system, struggles to announce the death of W.E.B. Du Bois at the 1963 March on Washington.
August 2010 -
Tony Karon: Two Minutes to Midnight?: Cutting Through the Media’s Bogus Bomb-Iran Debate
For the author of this post, the premises of the debate initiated by Jeffrey Goldberg’s recent piece in Atlantic Monthly are palpably false and incredibly dangerous.
August 2010 -
Beacon Broadside: Artifacts of the 1963 March on Washington
To commemorate the upcoming anniversary of the March on Washington on August 28th, Beacon Broadside has published scans of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s program from that day.
August 2010 -
Mark Floegel: A Review of Poisoned for Profit
How can a nation that has attained so much and claims such moral high ground in human rights and social values simultaneously pump out poisons that have sent American rates of birth defects, childhood cancer, asthma, and diabetes on an ever-rising trajectory?
August 2010 -
Robert Reich: Corporate Rotten Eggs
Years before Wright County Egg had to recall of millions of rotten eggs for fear of salmonella, the company was an awful corporate citizen.
August 2010 -
Fatima Bhutto: How the War on Terror is Hurting Flood-Weary Pakistanis
As Pakistan’s floods continue to rage, there seems to be no respite from the natural disaster compounded by poor infrastructure, corrupt and inept leadership and what Amnesty International USA is calling a ‘crisis of empathy.’
August 2010 -
David Bollier: The Power of Open Data: How Large-Scale Sharing and Collaboration are Helping to Solve Medical Mysteries
Science has always recognized the power of sharing in developing new knowledge, but the highly diverse research data on diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s is not easily shared. This post emphasizes how the most fruitful way forward is to pursue an “open source” approach that places the basic building-blocks of knowledge into the commons.
August 2010 -
Rec Room: William Brewer: Jim Henson’s “Monsterpiece Theater”
Fraggle Rock was a long-running segment that included a Cookie Monster version of retro PBS host Alistair Cooke (or Alistair Cookie) as he re-imagines literary classics for children.
August 2010 -
Pratap Chatterjee: The Secret Killers: Assassination in Afghanistan and Task Force 373
Task Force 373 and its “capture/kill” policies may be a nightmare for Afghans. For the rest of us, it should be seen as a symptom of deeper policy disasters. After all, it raises a basic question: Is this country really going to become known as a global Manhunters, Inc.?
August 2010 -
Rec Room: Rebecca Bates: Lucinella
The fear of anonymity and oblivion keeps this novella by Lore Segal fresh and timely.
August 2010 -
Robert Reich: Mitt Romney’s Wet-Noodle Economics
While Mitt Romney is right to focus his political efforts on the economy, Reich argues that Romney’s loony, wet-noodle economics won’t create American jobs.
August 2010 -
Chalmers Johnson: The Guns of August: Lowering the Flag on the American Century
What harm would befall the United States if we actually decided, against all odds, to close those hundreds and hundreds of bases, large and small, that we garrison around the world? What would happen to us if we were no longer the “sole superpower” or the world’s self-appointed policeman?
August 2010 -
Norman Solomon: General Petraeus Goes to Media War
Every week, billions of dollars and uncounted lives are sacrificed in the service of what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism.” While history is not exactly repeating, it is rhyming. Like a dirge.
August 2010 -
David Bollier: Squandering Our Genetic Heritage
Russian court jeopardizes a historic seed bank—and our ability to adapt to climate change.
August 2010 -
Robert Reich: Forget a Double Dip: We’re Still in One Long Big Dipper.
In a follow-up to a previous post, Robert Reich urges us to forget the Neo-Hoover deficit hawks who say we have to cut government spending and to distrust the supply-siders who say we have to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.
August 2010 -
The Sidney Hillman Foundation Commends Guernica's Blog
Khadija Sharife's “FIFA’s Love of Tax Havens”, which appeared exclusively on Guernica's blog, was the only article from an online-only or non-major media outlet to be mentioned as a “winner” in The Sidney Hillman Foundation's "Winners & Sinners" wrap-up.
August 2010 -
Hendrik Hertzberg: Counting the Flaws: The U.S. Debates Voting Systems
The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg introduces an eloquent debate on voting systems, including IRV or “Instant-Runoff Voting.”
August 2010 -
Tom Engelhardt: What If Washington…?: Five Absurd Things That Simply Can’t Happen in Wartime Washington
As a boy, Engelhardt loved reading what-if history and science fiction books. Here are his own five what-ifs, five possibilities that—given our world—verge on the fictional.
August 2010 -
Guernica’s Top 5 on Natural Disasters
Sweltering heat and blazing fires in Russia have contributed to devastating mudslides in Pakistan and China. Guernica counts down its top five reports of natural disasters.
August 2010 -
Mark Engler: The Gulf at the Gas Station: Can We Calculate the True Cost of Our Dependence on Oil?
“Calculating the cost of a destroyed ecosystem in the Gulf of Mexico…means putting a price tag on things that are not meant to be priced. If you accept that a harbor seal’s life is indeed worth seven hundred dollars, and a killer whale’s three hundred thousand dollars, pretty soon you must accept that your own life has a price tag on it as well.”
August 2010 -
Stephen Puleo: Boston and the Irish, on the Anniversary of the Ursuline Convent Riots
On August 11 and 12, 1834, a riot fueled by anti-Catholic fervor resulted in the burning of an Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in what is now Somerville. In this excerpt from A City So Grand: The Rise of an American Metropolis, Boston 1850-1900, Stephen Puleo examines the height of Irish immigration to the city in the years following the riot, and the deeply anti-Catholic and anti-Irish discrimination the new arrivals faced.
August 2010 -
Robert Reich: America's Biggest Jobs Program—The U.S. Military
If we didn’t have the military jobs program, the U.S. unemployment rate would be over 11.5 percent today. But wouldn’t it be better to have a jobs program that created things we really need?
August 2010 -
James Quilligan: Beyond State Capitalism: The Commons Economy in our Lifetimes
Although people’s rights to their commons are often recognized and validated in smaller communities, scaling these lessons to the global level will require a new dimension of popular legitimacy and authority.
August 2010 -
Amie Klempnauer Miller: Prop 8 and the Seven-Year-Old
“For those of us [same-sex couples] who have children, it is tremendously important to be able to show that our families are just as valued as everyone else’s.”
August 2010 -
Stacy Mitchell: Why Does Target Have a Subsidiary in Bermuda?
Small businesses may finally be fighting back against the big-box stores that pay lower taxes by operating subsidiaries in tax havens.
August 2010 -
Stephan Salisbury: Mosque Mania: Anti-Muslim Fears and the Far Right
A Lower Manhattan prayer space designed to promote reconciliation has become the dreaded “Mosque at Ground Zero.” This post explores the virulent racism and grassroots efforts opposing the Islamic cultural center two blocks from the former World Trade Center.
August 2010 -
Erica Wright: Q & A with Amy Greene, author of Bloodroot
In this Q&A, Greene discusses her frustration at how politics and religion merge in small-town Tennessee.
August 2010 -
Jay Walljasper: Not So Wonderful Life?
The good guy prevented Bedford Falls from becoming Pottersville in the movie. But what would happen in today’s economy?
August 2010 -
Rachel Somerstein: Two Shows at the International Center of Photography
Today’s photography may be taking place against a fractured mediascape, but the neat dichotomy posed by these two shows belies the true vibrancy of emerging photographers.
August 2010 -
Robert Reich: Why the Views of the Wall Street Journal’s Letter Writers Are Far From This World
Reich responds to the “rhetorical vacuity” in the Wall Street Journal’s Letters to the Editor.
August 2010 -
Carlos A. Ball: What Judge Walker’s Ruling Tells Us About the Right’s Twenty-Year Campaign of Spreading Fear on Same-Sex Marriage
It is one thing to say, during a political campaign, that same-sex marriage constitutes a threat to society or to the family or to children. It is another thing to back up those claims through the introduction of specific evidence in a court of law. In this post, the controversy over Proposition 8 is a battle of facts versus nonfacts.
August 2010 -
Rec Room: Alicia Hyman: Yellowfever
The energy of Yellowfever’s angular, minimalist pop is contagious.
August 2010 -
Rafia Zakaria: The Face We Can’t Ignore: Women in Afghanistan
TIME’s recent cover demonstrates that assessing the performance of the ten-year occupation in Afghanistan in the mutilated-yet-expectant features of a young woman serves as an appropriately graphic visual depiction of our failures in that country.
August 2010 -
Bill McKibben: We’re Hot as Hell and We’re Not Going to Take It Any More: Three Steps to Establish a Politics of Global Warming
In the fight to stop global warming, this post suggests, “We may need to get arrested. We definitely need art, and music, and disciplined, nonviolent, but very real anger.”
August 2010 -
David Bacon: Protestors Demand Immigrant Rights and Condemn SB1070
In San Francisco and Oakland, immigrants and community activists protested Arizona’s SB 1070. A day earlier Federal Judge Susan Bolton invalidated much of the law, but demonstrations involving thousands of people took place against the law around the country nevertheless.
August 2010 -
Remediate/Re-vision: Public Artists Engaging the Environment
The new exhibition of ecological art features works in public spaces that raise awareness about environmental fragility, as well as effect change within the immediate environment itself.
August 2010 -
David Bollier: The Couchsurfing Culture
The gift economy is alive and global among a network of "Couchsurfers" who stay in strangers' homes while traveling.
August 2010 -
Rec Room: Erica Wright: The Vicious Kind
The Vicious Kind is a tense dark comedy…and a warning to get more sleep.
August 2010 -
Daniel Moss: Historic Expansion of Human Rights: The UN Declares the Right to Clean Drinking Water and Sanitation
After more than a decade of grassroots organizing and lobbying, the global water justice movement achieved a significant victory when the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to affirm “the right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as a human right that is essential for the full enjoyment of life and all human rights.”
August 2010 -
Ann Jones: Here Be Dragons: MRAPs, Sprained Ankles, Air Conditioning, Farting Contests, and Other Snapshots from the American War in Afghanistan
Should war be gussied up like home? In this post, Jones suggests that if war were undisguisedly as nasty and brutish as it truly is, it might also be short.
August 2010 -
Margaret Regan: An Unsolved Murder, A Wave of Hysteria, and Deaths in the Desert
The unsolved murder of a rancher on his own land changes the conversation about immigration in the United States.
August 2010 -
Guernica’s Top 5 Whistleblowers
In light of last week’s act of epic whistleblowing, Guernica presents its top five favorite whistleblowers and leak enablers, all of whom have appeared in the magazine in some capacity.
July 2010 -
Guernica's Top 5 on Latinos in the U.S.
With the fracas over Arizona's immigration law putting Latin Americans in the spotlight, Guernica thought a countdown of our top stories on Latinos and Latin America would be apt. Here are our top 5.
July 2010 -
Andrew J. Bacevich: The End of (Military) History?: The United States, Israel, and the Failure of the Western Way of War
What are the implications of arriving at the end of Western military history? In this post, Bacevich asserts that the prospect of Big Wars solving Big Problems is probably gone for good.
July 2010 -
Aviva Chomsky: Immigration Mythology: The Rules Apply to Everyone
In this excerpt from “They Take Our Jobs!”: and 20 Other Myths about Immigration, Chomsky describes the huge population movement of people from the former colonies into the lands of their former colonial masters.
July 2010 -
Guernica at Park Lit Photo Recap
Photos from Guernica's reading in Union Square Park that featured Alexander Chee, Joshua Kors, and Terese Svoboda
July 2010 -
Danielle Ofri: Americans by Choice
“Somehow, it seems to have been forgotten that every American is or was an immigrant. Most of our grandparents and great-grandparents came here ‘illegally’ because immigrants were never particularly welcomed. But those generations of “Americans by Choice” built up our society and economy in a manner that has come to define America.”
July 2010 -
David Bollier: Wikileaks, the War, and Accountability: Leaked Documents from the Afghanistan War Confirm Some Hard, Dismal Truths
“We can now see more clearly that it is not just government that practices deception and censorship to advance its political interests; the commercial press is complicit in its own way, for its own reasons.”
July 2010 -
Erica Wright: On Adultery or Why Merwin is the Right Man for the Job
A humiliating night becomes life altering as Wright experiences Merwin’s “negative capability” for the first time.
July 2010 -
Norman Solomon: State of Denial: After the Big Leak, Spinning for War
In the current stage of denial, administration spinners are acutely eager to distinguish Obama’s “new policy” from events as recent as last year—as though we’re supposed to believe it’s no longer the case that the Taliban is “gaining strength.”
July 2010 -
Chuck Collins: A Long-Ago Meeting With The Remarkable Shirley Sherrod
Lost in the chatter about the firing of Shirley Sherrod and subsequent USDA apology is the unquestionable fact that she had devoted her entire life to economic justice.
July 2010 -
Tom Engelhardt: The Opposites Game: All the Strangeness of Our American World in One Article
Historically, it has undoubtedly been the nature of imperial powers to consider every strange thing they do more or less the norm. For a waning imperial power, however, such an attitude has its own dangers.
July 2010 -
Jay Walljasper: Detroit City Limits: Finding Devastation and Hope in a Hard Hit City
The urban-suburban divide in Detroit shows the need to treat a metropolitan area as a single organism, rooted in a sense of the commons.
July 2010 -
Robert Reich: We’re In A One-and-a-half Dip Recession
Herbert Hoover’s ghost seems to have captured the nation’s capital, and the prevailing sentiment is government can’t and mustn’t do anything but aim to reduce the deficit, even though the economy is going down.
July 2010 -
Chelsea Green Publishes the First Book on the Deepwater Horizon Disaster
Written by an industry insider, Disaster on the Horizon is a behind-the-scenes investigative look at the worst oil well accident in U.S. history, which has led to the current environmental and economic catastrophe in the Gulf.
July 2010 -
David Bollier: Buying Respectability? Pepsi Funds a Fellowship to Study Obesity and Diabetes
In an effort to spin its image as a health-conscious company, Pepsi endows a fellowship at Yale. What sorts of corporate endowments could be next? What does this spell for independent research?
July 2010 -
William J. Astore: “Our American Heroes”: Why It’s Wrong to Equate Military Service with Heroism
Whether in the military or in civilian life, heroes are rare—indeed, all-too-rare. That’s the reason we celebrate them. They’re the very best of us, which means they can’t be all of us.
July 2010 -
Sherrilyn Ifill: Shirley Sherrod's Story Begins Our Conversation on Race
A law professor explains why Shirley Sherrod is emblematic of how we think about race today.
July 2010 -
Rec Room: Rachel Louise Ensign: Tinkers
Unique, captivating, and a measure more magical than most other contemporary novels, Tinkers is a finely rendered tale of a father and son who exist mostly in separate, but twin, narratives that reflect their tragic inability to connect with one another.
July 2010 -
David Bollier: NAFTA, Mexican Corn, and the Commons
What happens when a market-based agricultural juggernaut invades a nine thousand-year-old system in Mexico?
July 2010 -
Sudanese President Charged With Genocide: Guernica Offers Two Views on Darfur
Last week, the International Criminal Court charged Sudan's president with genocide. Two interviews previously published in Guernica offer vastly opposing views of the conflict in Darfur.
July 2010 -
Robert Reich: Why We Can’t Rely on Foreign Consumers to Rescue American Jobs, and Why the “Jobs for America Summit” is a Bad Joke.
We can’t expect foreign consumers to fill the shortfall in demand left by American consumers who can no longer maintain their pre-recession standard of living. The only answer is to lift the standard of living of Americans. But how?
July 2010 -
Rec Room: William Brewer: Abner Jay’s The True Story of Abner Jay
The re-release of the American blues-roots musician is an eerie collection of traditional Pentecostal gospel, powerful lyrics underscoring a minimalist style, and humble instrumentation.
July 2010 -
News for Guernica Contributing Editor Michael Shankman
Contributing Art Editor at Guernica, was featured in yesterday’s San Francisco Examiner. Shankman reflects on his art, the recession, and the intractable differences between San Francisco and New York.
July 2010 -
Alex Halperin: Summer in the City
Last fall, Keith Nelson, co-founder of the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, and his friend Rob Hickman had been tooling around with their unicycles when they decided to ride over the Williamsburg Bridge. Their journey inspired them to unicycle over every bridge in the city.
July 2010 -
Rhoda Feng: The Plight of Migrant Tobacco Workers in Kazakhstan
In Kazakhstan, migrant workers are essentially indentured servants: they are often cheated of earnings, deprived of regular wages, and have their passports confiscated by their employers.
July 2010 -
Rebecca Bates: The Daily Show’s (Nonexistent) Woman Problem
Jezebel’s accusation of sexism on the set of The Daily Show relies heavily on the sour feelings of fired employees, ironically depriving the women of the show a voice.
July 2010 -
Moshe Adler: Possible Cause of Death: Privatization
The death of a baby from a falling tree limb in Central Park raises a one hundred and eighty-five year-old problem. Namely, the contracting out of Central Park maintenance diminishes the level of know-how of the government on the one hand, and contractors save money by cutting corners on the other.
July 2010 -
Rachel Somerstein: Mohamed Bourouissa’s “Documentary” Photography
The Algerian-born photographer turns his lens to the male-dominated communities of Parisian suburbs—always on the precipice of trouble.
July 2010 -
Ella Cantarow: Big Oil Makes War on the Earth: The Gulf Coast Joins an Oil-Soiled Planet
Our addiction to oil is now blowing back on the civilization that can’t do without its gushers and can’t quite bring itself to imagine a real transition to alternative energies.
July 2010 -
Susie Linfield Interviewed on Late Night Live
“[Genocide is a] negation of the human…Until that is recognized, words like reconciliation are a bit too easy, a bit too glib.”
July 2010 -
Adam Davidson-Harden and Jay Walljasper: Rehydrating India
Knowing that “[w]ater is a very emotional, spiritual thing,” Rajendra Singh, founder of the Young India Association, helps bring the Arvari River back to life.
July 2010 -
William Powers: Declare Independence from Stuff
Do we want to spend our time and energy earning money and contributing to a carbon-intensive economy, or fostering creative pursuits, the arts, and strengthening our relationships and community?
July 2010 -
Guernica at Park-Lit 2010
Wednesday, July 21, 6:30 P.M. Guernica will be participating in the Park-Lit reading series at Union Square Park, and will feature non-fiction by Joshua Kors, poetry by Terese Svoboda, and fiction by Alexander Chee.
July 2010 -
Nancy D. Polikoff: What Married Same-Sex Couples Owe to Hippie Communes
Last week's ruling in Gill v. OPM shows how much debt gay rights advocates owe to hippie communes.
July 2010 -
Rafia Zakaria: Banning the Veil, Loving the Face?
The veil debates in France are not relegated to the face veil issue alone. Covering up the face in any manner is seen as a simulation, the pretense of an identity but one that prevents the onlooker from actually discerning it.
July 2010 -
Keith Farnish: Anger is Good
Anger is a protective instinct. But by what means is it a constructive instrument for change?
July 2010 -
News for Guernica Poet Paula Bohince
Bohince blends the pastoral with something decidedly more sinister, placing her poems within a landscape that is at once dream-like and familiar.
July 2010 -
Jane Fulton Alt’s “Crude Awakening”
Alt’s project is like a series family portraits gone wrong. Pregnant women, children, the elderly all find themselves casualties of the oil spill, their bodies drenched in the stuff, confusion and feelings of betrayal stretched across their faces.
July 2010 -
Nick Turse: Death on Your Doorstep: What Sebastian Junger and Restrepo Won’t Tell You About War
If Americans care only sparingly for their paid, professional soldiers…they care even less about Afghan civilians. That’s why they don’t understand war. And that’s why they’ll think that the essence of war is what they’re seeing as they sit in the dark and watch Restrepo.
July 2010 -
Chuck Close at Strand Bookstore
Thursday, July 15, 7 p.m. Photorealist painter Chuck Close will speak at Strand Bookstore’s Rare Book Room with biographer Christopher Finch.
July 2010 -
Rachael Goldberg: Rec Room: Oddsac
Animal Collective’s psychedelic visual-musical series is a study of stress, agitation, and alienation.
July 2010 -
Xiaoda Xiao: Prison Paintings
Artist Xiaoda Xiao spent seven years in a forced labor prison in his native China for defacing a portrait of Chairman Mao. He completed following works to accompany the release of his new book.
July 2010 -
Tom Engelhardt: Why Are We in Afghanistan?: As Petraeus Takes Over, Could Success Be Worse Than Failure?
Failure breeds critics, you might say, the way dead bodies breed flies. Or put another way, it’s easy enough to criticize a failing American project, but what about a successful one?
July 2010 -
Robert Reich: The Vanishing American Consumer and the Coming Trade War
When the world’s productive capacities exceed the buying power of the world’s consumers, every government wants to increase exports and discourage imports. That spells trade war.
July 2010 -
Greg Pahl: Excerpt from The Citizen-Powered Energy Handbook: Community Solutions to a Global Crisis
“If I had to choose between relying on my community, or some large, faceless, out-of-state corporation for my survival, I’ll put my money on the community. And that is exactly what I am proposing. Literally.”
July 2010 -
William J. Astore: Hope and Change Fade, but War Endures: Seven Reasons Why We Can’t Stop Making War
Why do our elites so readily and regularly give war, not peace, a chance? What exactly are the wellsprings of Washington’s (and America’s) behavior when it comes to war and preparations for more of the same?
July 2010 -
Robert Reich: Slouching Toward a Double Dip or a Lousy Recovery at Best
The bank bailout, the stimulus, and the Fed brought us back from the brink just enough to dampen zeal for anything more. As a result, we are now heading for a weak comeback.
July 2010 -
Roger Wilkins: A Deeply American Experience: Excerpt from Jefferson’s Pillow
“One famous African American has been quoted recently as saying, ‘At no time have I ever felt like an American.’ Well, I have—all my life.”
July 2010 -
David Bollier: The Enclosure of the Gulf of Mexico
The noxious gusher of oil flowing from one mile beneath the Gulf of Mexico is an unprecedented environmental disaster, no doubt about it. But will we learn the right lessons from it?
July 2010 -
Sherrilyn Ifill: Trashing Thurgood Marshall
For Republicans, the issue of race is good for confirmation hearings. But they may have gotten more than they bargained for in the negative reactions to their bashing of a civil rights icon.
July 2010 -
Stephan Salisbury: Stage-Managing the War on Terror: Ensnaring Terrorists Demands Creativity
Informers have by now become our first line of defense in our battles with the evildoers. How expansive will the stage become for informers and their government directors now working the theater of the Great Recession?
July 2010 -
Norman Solomon: Unanimous Conformity in the Senate
In the Senate of 2010, the baseline of conscience and courage is at an abysmally low level.
July 2010 -
Khadija Sharife: FIFA's Love of Tax Havens
Although the Swiss parliament has allowed FIFA to keep their non-profit status, the international soccer organization will certainly be cashing in during the 2010 World Cup, thanks to the set of financial conditions that they impose upon all host countries
July 2010 -
Margaret Regan: Fourth of July in the Borderlands: Praying for Rain
The true culprit [for migrant deaths] is the increased border enforcement. The more walls we build, the more Border Patrol agents we add, the farther into the wilderness these migrants go, and the more that die.
July 2010 -
Rec Room: Meakin Armstrong: Nothingness and Rejection
“We all run out of inspiration. I’m in that mood where I despise it all, and care to write about nothing.”
July 2010 -
Michael Avery: Remarks on Contemporary Government Themes in Henry V
“I suggest, war is war. If you make war on the Constitution, you are as accountable as if you make war on the country.”
July 2010 -
Ann Jones: Counterinsurgency Down for the Count in Afghanistan…But the War Grinds On and On and On
Why, when President Obama fires an insubordinate and failing general, does he cling to his failing war policy? And if our strategy isn’t working, what about the enemy’s? And if nothing much is working, why does it still go on nonstop this way?
July 2010 -
Rec Room: William Brewer: The Master and Margarita
Social conditioning is a bitch. But it’s damned hilarious too.
July 2010 -
Rec Room: Rebecca Bates: Graphomania, Blogs, and Masturb8tion
Our world is saturated with blogs. They’re easy to start, even easier to abandon, and are often as insular as a wall of mirrors.
July 2010 -
Stephen Kinzer: BP in the Gulf—The Persian Gulf: How an Oil Company Helped Destroy Democracy in Iran
Many Americans are outraged by the corporate recklessness that allowed the Deepwater Horizon spill to happen. Those who know Iranian history have been less surprised.
July 2010 -
Rec Room: Alicia Hyman: So Cow’s So Cow
An uneven album of cringe-inducing honesty and some damn catchy moments.
June 2010 -
Rachel Louise Ensign: South of the Border Goes Into the Fire
In last Friday’s New York Times, Steven Holden’s review of the new film South of the Border was accompanied by a piece alleging that the film is full of “mistakes, misstatements and missing details.” Filmmakers Oliver Stone, Tariq Ali, and Mark Weisbrot issued a biting rebuttal.
June 2010 -
David Chura: A Law That Could Keep Kids out of the System
When you’re fifteen, sitting in a cramped, dirty, smelly cell, cut off from anyone and anything that has any meaning to you, you get mighty skeptical and feel abandoned. Many congressional sponsors feel the JJPDA could reinstate hope for incarcerated teens.
June 2010 -
Rebecca Bates: Q&A with Bill Clegg, Author of Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man
“There was still a residual paranoia and I could not tell what was real and what was delusional…[Death] is there. It’s fundamentally always there, not as a fixation or believed-in solution but a drift, a tendency.”
June 2010 -
Robert Dreyfuss: The Land Where Theories of Warfare Go to Die: Obama, Petraeus, and the Cult of COIN in Afghanistan
Having ousted one rebellious general, the president now has little choice but to confront—or cave in to—the entire COIN cult, including its guru.
June 2010 -
David Gessner: A House That We Built: A Nursery Rhyme for the Gulf
This is the marsh that breathes with the sea, and protects the land,/ That now fills with oil That spills from the pipe/ And gushes into the Gulf.
June 2010 -
Robert Reich: Why China’s Currency Announcement is Hokum
Don’t be fooled. China’s decision to allow its currency to rise against the dollar is nothing to get excited about.
June 2010 -
Tom Engelhardt: America Detached from War: Bush’s Pilotless Dream, Smoking Drones, and Other Strange Tales from the Crypt
With the increasing use of the robotic drone—the Lady Gaga of weapons—America may be instigating the next era of lawless and valorless warfare.
June 2010 -
Michael T. Klare: BP-Style Extreme Energy Nightmares to Come: Four Scenarios for the Next Energy Mega-Disaster
As long as we continue our reckless pursuit of “extreme energy,” political and environmental instability will inevitably cause a domino effect of unprecedented calamities.
June 2010 -
Rafia Zakaria: Honor and Terror
In recent honor killings of Muslim women in Canada, faith becomes entangled with a controlling ego and produces disastrous consequences.
June 2010 -
Rec Room: Erica Wright: Angela Carter
At once magical realism, post-modernism, and science fiction, Carter’s work defies categorization.
June 2010 -
Kevin Canfield: Soccer Stats
In the new era of sophisticated soccer statistics, we no longer have to rely solely on gut feelings.
June 2010 -
Robert Reich: My Father and Alan Greenspan
In this belated Father’s Day post, Alan Greenspan may have sired today’s “federal debt explosion.”
June 2010 -
Rec Room: Alex Halperin: Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter
Despite its cultural impact, being a gamer has never shed its associations of pimply adolescence. Are the artistic aspirations of a few genius game designers worth the social cost?
June 2010 -
Aseem Chhabra: Confused American Critics
Many U.S. critics treat Bollywood films with kid gloves for the fear of offending sensibilities.
June 2010 -
Robert Lipsyte: We Won, Dad, But I’m Lost: Lessons from Tiger, Lance, and Andre
When it comes to Pee Wee—and professional—sports, benign fatherly neglect may be the healthiest mode of parenting.
June 2010 -
Nick Turse: Kick Ass or Buy Gas?: How Taxpayers Are Subsidizing BP’s Disaster Through the Pentagon
Even as the tar balls hit Gulf beaches, American tax dollars are subsidizing BP, and the U.S. military continues to carry on a major business partnership with the company, despite its disastrous environmental record.
June 2010 -
Rec Room: Meakin Armstrong: Just Ignore That Damned New Yorker List
The New Yorker is lauded for keeping the literary flame alive—one that’s sucking all of the oxygen out of the room.
June 2010 -
Tom Engelhardt: Call the Politburo, We’re in Trouble: Entering the Soviet Era in America
As the military continues to hemorrhage money and get drunk with power, the U.S. begins more and more to resemble its once mighty rival, the Soviet Union.
June 2010 -
David Bollier: A New Global Landmark for Free Speech
The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative will provide unparalleled protection for online journalists and whistleblowers.
June 2010 -
Rafia Zakaria: Reform or Renounce? Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Muslim Women
The Somali-born former Dutch parliamentarian finds herself in a political conundrum: What can be done to save lives of women destroyed by patriarchal interpretations of Islam while reform is still a work in progress?
June 2010 -
Rec Room: Rachel Louise Ensign: Poetry Podcasts
Rethinking the familiar and exploring the unknown through sound.
June 2010 -
WikiLeaks Responds to Arrest of Alleged Leaker
Bradley Manning is being held without trial for allegedly leaking U.S. military video.
June 2010 -
John Feffer: Stealth Superpower: How Turkey Is Chasing China to Become the Next Big Thing
The Ottoman Empire turned "sick man of Europe" builds a new identity and reinserts itself into international conflicts.
June 2010 -
Rec Room: Alicia Hyman: Roger Ebert and Twitter
After losing the ability to speak, Roger Ebert reclaims his voice by Tweeting.
June 2010 -
Rec Room: Rebecca Bates: Literature and Cinematography
“We live in a poor and enclosed world. We do not feel the world in which we live”…and we should.
June 2010 -
Robert Reich: Why the United States Can't Get BP to Do What's Necessary
UK pensioners versus American workers. Who wins?
June 2010 -
Juan Cole: Iran's Green Movement: One Year Later
How Israel's Gaza blockade and Washington's sanctions policy helped keep the hardliners in power.
June 2010 -
Rec Room: Christian Anthony: Arakawa
Arakawa, the Japanese conceptual artist who decided not to participate in mortality, died this May.
June 2010 -
David Bollier: What Financial Crisis?
Wall Street and Washington collude to sabotage meaningful financial reform.
June 2010 -
Rec Room: Noelle Bodick: The Word Book
Mieko Kanai's aesthetic is indifferent to the notion of nation, irreverent to rootedness of place, allowing her to create bold experiments.
June 2010 -
Bill McKibben: If There Was Ever a Moment to Seize
Will Obama stand up to big energy in deeds as well as words?
June 2010 -
Rec Room: Jake Whitney: Paths of Glory
The best anti-war film ever made is not Stanley Kubrick's brilliant dark comedy, Dr. Strangelove, but his 1957 masterpiece.
June 2010 -
Rafia Zakaria: Victims and Victimizers
Can Muslims expect tolerance from western nations where they are minorities when their own nations are unwilling to apply similar concepts?
June 2010 -
Rec Room: Meakin Armstrong: Stupidity and The Encyclopedia of Stupidity
Given the recent major acts of idiocy (the BP fiasco), it's about time we studied stupidity and kept the chronically dense (Palin & co.) from destroying our world.
June 2010 -
Aviva Chomsky: My U.S. Passport
We're living in a global apartheid. First World countries shut themselves off to travelers, while assuming that their own citizens have the right to travel anywhere they choose.
June 2010 -
Disgusted by Israel? Grossed Out by Oil? Then Do NOT Read This
Once a gigantic oil spill (the size of the Exxon Valdez spill of 1989) and Israel's excessive force were married not just in time, but in the selfsame event. Namely, in the Israeli military's rollick through Lebanon four summers back.
June 2010 -
Mac McClelland on GritTV: BP Blocking Workers from Wearing Respirators
In trying to report on the oil spill in the Gulf, McClelland recalls telling BP it's a public beach. "But it's BP's oil," she is told.
June 2010 -
Five Questions for Sarah Lindsay
This issue’s featured poet on galactic collisions, scientific verse, and poetry’s archaeological powers.
June 2010 -
Rec Room: Alicia Hyman: Best Coast
Maybe all you want is a sunny day on the beach and someone to sleep next to at night, but shit's more complicated than that.
June 2010 -
Rec Room: Joel Whitney: Reason Magazine's Hit and Run Blog
Ah, the moral courage of opinion journalists, fighting against censorship, multiculturalists and cowardly liberals like me!
June 2010 -
David Bollier: Reintegrating Mind, Life and Matter
We're destroying our environment because we've killed the ties between mind and nature.
June 2010 -
Rec Room: Christian Anthony: “The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains”
Remember that feeling you had that the Internet was eating your brain? Yeah. You weren't too far off the mark.
June 2010 -
Carol Joffe: The Legacy of George Tiller
Continuing Dr. Tiller's fight for abortion rights one year after his death.
June 2010 -
Rec Room: Alex Halperin: Rolling Back P.J. O'Rourke's Lame Period?
O'Rourke should go back to reporting, or retire. With articles like this he's just writing his own pre-obituary.
June 2010 -
Dilip Hiro: The American Century Is So Over
Obama’s rudderless foreign policy underscores America’s waning power.
May 2010 -
Adele Barker: The Lives of Books
How writing can and can't help the post-war healing process.
May 2010 -
Rec Room: Preeta Samarasan: Food and Politics
Clever and fearless insight into Malaysia's complex racial and political situations.
May 2010 -
Rafia Zakaria: The War On Baloch Women
Violence against women exists in every nation in the world, but perhaps only in Pakistan is it so easily tolerated and so rarely punished.
May 2010 -
Rec Room: Adaeze Elechi: “Write the Future”
Ads typically make me nervous, but I was unable to fend off the wit and charm of this Nike World Cup commercial.
May 2010 -
Subhankar Banerjee: BPing the Arctic?
Will Shell Oil to do to arctic waters what BP did to the Gulf?
May 2010 -
Video: Urban Farming in Detroit
Detroit Mayor Dave Bing was less enthusiastic than his predecessor about turning Detroit's ruins into farms. Not anymore.
May 2010 -
Daniel Moss: How Dirty Are We Willing to Get?
Can corporate money really repair the climate?
May 2010 -
Stephan Salisbury: Citizen Alioune: How Not to Deal with Muslims in America
The Senegalese Muslim vendor who first spotted the smoking SUV in Times Square and alerted police is no hero.
May 2010 -
Rec Room: Kristen Brunelli: Carefusion Jazz Festival NYC
This June, catch one of jazz's youngest and most stunning performers.
May 2010 -
Ruthie Ackerman: To Publish or Not to Publish
Faced with citizen photographs of two men beaten to death by a mob in Liberia, Ackerman had to make an ethical decision: to publish, or not to publish.
May 2010 -
Rec Room: Joel Whitney: Alain de Botton's Twitter Page
Alain de Botton has humanized the mechanical beast that is Twitter.
May 2010 -
Steve Wilson: The Spanglish of Los Suns
The intent was to show solidarity with the 15 percent of NBA fans of Hispanic heritage, but in reality, the Phoenix Suns' Spanglish uniforms meant nothing.
May 2010 -
Rec Room: Adaeze Elechi: “Take A Negro Home”
All the traumatizing things that happen when people dare to rip down solid walls of segregation.
May 2010 -
Michael T. Klare: The Relentless Pursuit of Extreme Energy: A New Oil Rush Endangers the Gulf of Mexico and the Planet
Expect more disasters like the one in the Gulf of Mexico.
May 2010 -
Meakin Armstrong: Samuel Fuller: Cinema's Beautiful Blowhard
Watching a Samuel Fuller film is seeing the unpredictable. It breaks the rules of “good” writing—and just goes for the jugular.
May 2010 -
Frances Moore Lappé: Why Are We Afraid of Saying “Socialism”?
Knee-jerk reactions to words like "socialism" and "capitalism" get us nowhere. We need to first define the terms.
May 2010 -
Rec Room: Rachel Somerstein: Femmes Algérienne
It took the French government 10 days to humiliate 2000 Algerian women. It took Marc Garanger almost 50 years to "right" the wrong.
May 2010 -
Fred Pearce: The Century of the Old
Half of all the people in human history who ever reached the age of 65 are alive now. What does that mean for our society?
May 2010 -
Rec Room: Elizabeth Onusko: High Violet
There's a reason this album is getting international attention.
May 2010 -
Keli Goff: Words of Caution for Elena Kagan, There's a Far Touchier Reproductive Issue Than Abortion
For some reason the idea of not having children remains one of the most taboo subjects, especially for women.
May 2010 -
Kristen Brunelli: Daniel Berrigan: Of Wars, Faith, and Poetry
Berrigan, refusing to simply float through life, has both a unifying and polarizing way with humanity.
May 2010 -
David Bollier: Big Pharma's Enclosure of Academic Medicine
How drug marketers have thoroughly corrupted academic medicine.
May 2010 -
Adaeze Elechi: Lewis Black Diagnoses the Disease that is Glenn Beck
It's Nazi Tourette's. No sh*t...
May 2010 -
Jonathan M. Metzl: In Medical Records, a Story of the Racialization of Schizophrenia
What are the connections between mental health and sociopolitical injustice?
May 2010 -
Rec Room: Alex Halperin: How to Spend It
For those with filthy rich aspirations (and those who like to make jest of the filthy rich's excesses).
May 2010 -
Ellen Friedrichs: Why We Still Blame Victims of Rape
Recent research reminds us that no matter how far we've come in our understanding of the crime of rape, the old sexist beliefs die hard.
May 2010 -
Rec Room: Adaeze Elechi: Babies
These babies' homes and cultures could not be more different, but their adventures exploring, understanding and fitting into a new world are identical.
May 2010 -
Huma Yusuf: A Case for Irony
The Faisalabad police brutality story demonstrates that the proud feminist aspect of Benazir Bhutto's political legacy has fallen by the wayside.
May 2010 -
Emily Wilson: Portrait of a Jihadist: New Documentary ‘The Oath’ Reveals ‘Human Side’ of al-Qaeda
Documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras discusses her new film about Salim Hamdan's brother-in-law, Abu Jandal, a Yemeni taxi driver who was Osama bin Laden's bodyguard.
May 2010 -
Rec Room: Meakin Armstrong: Jellyfish
This film is melancholic, but still in love with the world and its magic.
May 2010 -
Rafia Zakaria: A Limited Education
This Saudi Arabian university may be forward-thinking when it comes to gender equality in higher education, but falls short when it comes to migrant tolerance.
May 2010 -
Rec Room: Christian Anthony: Play
It’s like being stuck in a video game dream. Virtual realms are indistinguishable from real life. It’s kind of unsettling.
May 2010 -
Alexandra Smith: Torture At Home: Documentary On Solitary Confinement in U.S. Prisons Misses the Mark
National Geographic’s well-intentioned effort to show the horrors of solitary confinement may have caused more harm than good.
May 2010 -
Aviva Chomsky: Testimonies from the Desert: What’s Behind Our Standard of Living?
Without those who labor for little pay, certain products and services in the U.S. could come at a much higher price.
May 2010 -
Rec Room: Adaeze Elechi: Nashville Flood
These images make one realize the severity of the situation.
May 2010 -
Michael T. Klare: China’s Global Shopping Spree
Is the world’s future resource map tilting East?
May 2010 -
Rec Room: Kristen Brunelli: Vincere
Sometimes the line between hate and adoration is intangible.
May 2010 -
Black Sheep & Exploding Turbans: A Guernica/PEN Event
Europe is struggling to come to terms with its Muslim minority. What are the consequences of the intolerance and the violence for the continent and for literature? Join Paul Berman, Jamal Mahjoub, Sadanand Dhume and the rest of this brilliant panel...
May 2010 -
Rec Room: Erica Wright: Special Topics in Calamity Physics
It might be more than 500 pages long, but this book zips along like the best of its lighter kin.
April 2010 -
Tom Engelhardt: Yes, We Could Get Out!: Why We Won't Leave Afghanistan or Iraq
Washington makes it seem so impossible, but we really could withdraw our massive armies from Iraq and Afghanistan.
April 2010 -
Rec Room: Ricardo Maldonado: The Things They Carried
The theater of war comes to us, it seems, obliquely; all residue becomes part of the offices of men…
April 2010 -
Bruce E. Levine: Are Psychiatric Drugs Causing the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America?
Investigative reporter Robert Whitaker discusses the dramatic increase in mental illness disability and its surprising cause.
April 2010 -
Rec Room: Alex Halperin: The Big Rich
How the first families of Texas oil acquired all the money in the world, and then turned to politics.
April 2010 -
Rafia Zakaria: Burka Ban and Earthquakes
State intervention in women's clothing, whether it involves promoting the burka or banning it, achieves the same purpose: subjugating women's bodies to the dictates of men.
April 2010 -
June Carolyn Erlick: A Gringa in Bogotá: Candidates and Caballos
Even as war lingers in the Colombian countryside, I have faith in the power of Colombian citizens to effect change through ballots, through the rule of law.
April 2010 -
Rec Room: Alex Smith: How to Impress an Architect
When next you find yourself in conversation with an architect, be sure to mention at least one of these books.
April 2010 -
The Diversity Test: Gender and Literature in Translation: A Guernica/PEN Event
Join novelist Claire Messud and a prestigious panel for a lively debate on gender, culture, and literature in translation.
April 2010 -
Rec Room: Adaeze Elechi: Lagos Wide & Close
Lagos is no New York, but there is much to learn from the ancient city.
April 2010 -
Brad Reed: How the Used-Car Salesmen at Goldman Sachs Tricked Investors into Buying Their Busted Clunkers
Goldman Sachs is being sued by the government for allegedly defrauding its investors. Confused? Here's some plain talk about a mega rip-off.
April 2010 -
Rec Room: Meakin Armstrong: Mating
Are others curious why Rush chose a female voice? I’m hoping this matter will be approached during the April 26 Guernica/PEN event where he’ll be a panelist.
April 2010 -
Rebecca Solnit: 350 Degrees of Inseparability
The good news about the very bad news (about climate change).
April 2010 -
William J. Astore: American Kleptocracy: How Fears of Socialism and Fascism Hide Naked Theft
The term once reserved for failed governments can now successfully be applied to the United States.
April 2010 -
Rec Room: Katherine Dykstra: New Orleans Jazz
These big brass records are the heartbeat of HBO’s new show Treme.
April 2010 -
Medea Benjamin: Many in the Tea Party Crowd Have Little Appetite for War and Empire
How libertarians and social progressives can make common cause against expansive—and expensive—empire
April 2010 -
Rec Room: Joel Whitney: An Image from the White Rose
Nobody loves spam. But what if the spam is to bring down Adolph Hitler?
April 2010 -
David Sirota: Corrupt Practices Accelerating the Decline of American Journalism
We have people posturing as journalists on TV who get paid as business spokespeople, financial reporters who retire to work for Goldman Sachs—media parasites.
April 2010 -
Rec Room: David Xia: Treme
From the creator of the hit TV show The Wire comes the story of a wounded post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans neighborhood.
April 2010 -
Guernica Editor Wins Sidney Hillman Award
Alex Halperin wins award for socially-conscious journalism.
April 2010 -
Alfred W. McCoy: America and the Dictators: From Ngo Dinh Diem to Hamid Karzai
The consequences of tampering with other nations’ governments.
April 2010 -
Rec Room: Alex Smith: "Allergy-Free New York"
Thomas Ogren suggests replacing New York's trees with ones that produce less pollen, but what are the greater implications of humans controlling such a natural process as tree growth?
April 2010 -
Sophia Raday: Art Lesson: A Child’s Drawing of the War in Iraq
Raday and her son deal with the emotional fallout from her husband’s deployment.
April 2010 -
Jasmin Ramsey: Canadian Academics Under Fire For Opposing Scholarship Program For Children of “Heroes” Who Died In War
Fifteen university professors have written a letter calling Canada’s “Project Hero” scholarship “a dangerous cultural turn” that associates “heroism” with military intervention.
April 2010 -
Rec Room: Alex Halperin: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
It’s moody and modern. The characters seem like recognizable people—laptop users and obsessive coffee drinkers—who happen to be conducting criminal investigations.
April 2010 -
Mark Winne: Black Farmers and Savannah Foodies Join Forces for Healthy Food
Organic farming unites formerly disconnected communities and generations in Savannah, Georgia.
April 2010 -
Rec Room: Kyle McAuley: Congratulations
Does indie rock have anything new to say? Probably, but you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise after listening to MGMT’s new album Congratulations.
April 2010 -
Lorraine Adams: Katyn
This fall, when I was in Krakow, I paused at the Katyn memorial off Krakow’s main square. Today, I would be placing my flowers below the cross if I could.
April 2010 -
Rec Room: Meakin Armstrong: Women and Country
I’m not going to lose my mind over this album, but it’s filled with songs I’m going to keep.
April 2010 -
Rachel Somerstein: Liveblog: Cities and Women's Health Conference
Childbirth rights in Mozambique, the dark fate of female Cambodian refugees, and the challenges facing maturing female students in developing countries.
April 2010 -
Stacy Mitchell: An Overlooked Strategy for Fighting Global Warming
How small retail could help the environment.
April 2010 -
Rec Room: Christian Anthony: “Triumph of the Cyborg”
People get so mad when something computer generated makes them feel emotional. Humans can make other humans feel things, but when machines do it, it’s creepy.
April 2010 -
Mara D'Angelo: Structural Barriers to Women's Health: Preventing Infant Mortality in Delhi
Poor women in Delhi, India, are facing a variety of barriers to accessing healthcare institutions that must be addressed if the government's goals are to be realized.
April 2010 -
Rec Room: Alex Smith: SANNA Designs
SANNA exhibits the restraint and elegance that has come to a global society still learning from its mistakes.
April 2010 -
Rec Room: David Xia: When All Else Fails
In a time of health care reform and proposals to enhance consumer protection, this book shows us that the government has played and will continue to play an increasing role in all aspects of American life through its risk management policies.
April 2010 -
Tom Engelhardt: Believe It or Not (2010 Imperial Edition)
U.S. war-fighting numbers to knock your socks off.
April 2010 -
Rec Room: Ricardo Maldonado: English as She Is Spoke
Language can be nonsense or mere telephone play.
April 2010 -
David Bollier: Should Genes be Patentable?
A federal court strikes down gene patents for breast cancer.
April 2010 -
Rec Room: Elizabeth Onusko: LateNightTales
This collection of songs creates a mellow, ethereal, emotional atmosphere without being sentimental.
April 2010 -
Rafia Zakaria: The Fourth Cup of Tea
When Three Cups of Tea was published in 2006, publishers were unsure of its reception. Their fears were unfounded. The book’s story of a failed American mountain climber’s humanitarian project to build schools in the most underprivileged parts of Pakistan’s northern areas resounded with millions.
April 2010 -
Rec Room: Adaeze Elechi: White Teeth
As long as people move around in this world, and as long as we fall in love with people of different cultures and races, the stories in White Teeth will be relevant and inevitable.
April 2010 -
John Czarnecki: Lost Treasures
Historic preservation in the United States could face a significant financial blow if Congress passes the federal budget as proposed by the Obama Administration.
April 2010 -
Rec Room: Alex Halperin: Hospital
Following the decidedly bloodless drama of the health care bill, this book presents what American medicine really looks like.
April 2010 -
Fatima Bhutto: Notes on a Father's Murder
Bhutto was just fourteen when her father was gunned down outside her house. Her new book, Songs of Blood and Sword commemorates that death, tells her father's and her family's story, and blames Pakistan's current president for the crime.
March 2010 -
Norman Solomon: A Bomber Jacket Doesn’t Cover the Blood
President Obama has taken a further plunge into the kind of war abyss that consumed predecessors named Johnson, Nixon and Bush.
March 2010 -
Rec Room: Meakin Armstrong: I’m Here
This story of two robots in love asserts that sacrifice is what makes love worthwhile.
March 2010 -
Video: Bruce Rich on Universal Health Care in Ancient India
One of the many programs established by ancient Indian emperor Ashoka was a system of universal health care for people and animals, which served the empire for close to a millennium.
March 2010 -
Rec Room: Erica Wright: The Anthologist
This book is really a sneaky lesson on poetic forms and how great they are. Like in those commercials where parents lie about the vegetable content of a particular snack.
March 2010 -
Tom Engelhardt: When Was the Last Time You Visited Iraq?: Exporting American Democracy to the World
Perhaps the U.S. should think twice before shipping its dysfunctional democracy abroad.
March 2010 -
Rec Room: Kristen Brunelli: Waking Sleeping Beauty
For those of us who feel slightly defined by Disney’s animated films, this documentary is a wonderful reminder of them, as well as an interesting look at the animation studio’s history.
March 2010 -
Joel Whitney: Ayaan Hirsi Ali on AEI's Openness to Dissent
In February 2007, Ayaan Hirsi Ali approached the American Enterprise Institute with a fresh gaze and found it very open to outside ideas, and found Frum a "delightful guy." My challenge to her now is, will you defend him?
March 2010 -
Julian Assange: Something is Rotten in the State of Iceland
When Guernica saw Wikileaks’ cryptic tweets on early Wednesday just after midnight, we asked Wikileaks’ founder, Julian Assange, what gives…
March 2010 -
Rec Room: Katherine Dykstra: Nothing Right
Each of the women in these short stories are realistically drawn.
March 2010 -
Wendell Potter Reacts to the Passing of the Health Care Reform Bill
Guernica editors Joel Whitney and Michael Archer recently emailed Wendell Potter, former mouthpiece for Cigna and ubiquitous healthcare commentator, about passage of the legislation.
March 2010 -
Rec Room: Francis Reynolds: Goodbye, Dragon Inn
Tsai Ming-Liang uses the isolation of the cinema experience to beautiful and unsettling ends.
March 2010 -
David Bacon: We Need a Better Alternative for Immigration Reform
The U.S. needs reform that unites people and protects everyone’s rights and jobs, immigrant and non-immigrant alike.
March 2010 -
Rec Room: Joel Whitney: Why Translation Matters
Look out for Edith Grossman’s essay on the joys and travails of translating Don Quixote.
March 2010 -
Rec Room: Elizabeth Onusko: The Art of Simple Food
Waters is not heavy-handed or preachy—she’s an expert at demystifying cooking.
March 2010 -
Robert Reich: The Final Health Care Vote and What it Really Means
Sunday’s vote confirms our hope that we can have both strength and competence in Washington. It is an audacious hope, but we have no choice.
March 2010 -
Rec Room: Ricardo Maldonado: Moulin Rouge!
The culture of love, Lurhmann seems to say, is as sane as the monkey house—one cannot help but check oneself in.
March 2010 -
William J. Astore: The Pentagon Church Militant and Us: The Top Five Questions We Should Ask the Pentagon
Imagine, for a moment, if Pentagon officials, supposedly toiling in our name, actually condescended to ask us for our thoughts.
March 2010 -
Rec Room: Kristen Brunelli: Exit 117
This film is not a complaint about the lackluster life of New Jersey teens. It is almost the opposite—it is art.
March 2010 -
David Bollier: Our Psychic Connections to Nature
Now there is a name for the emotional distress caused by ecological destruction.
March 2010 -
Rec Room: Alex Smith: The BLDGBLOG Book
A stunning book filled with some of the most intriguing ideas about constructed space I have ever read.
March 2010 -
Robert Reich: The Sham Recovery
So what happens when the stimulus is over and the Fed begins to tighten again? Where will demand come from to get Main Street back, create jobs, raise middle class wages?
March 2010 -
A Guernica Reading, Mac McClelland of Mother Jones
An evening of friends and a powerful, fresh voice.
March 2010 -
Rec Room: Alex Halperin: The Big Short
Inevitably, Michael Lewis’s new book will be a cracking read.
March 2010 -
Lewis Lapham: The Great White Whale in San Francisco Bay Or How the “Lively Arts” Became “the Media”
Truth as synonym for liberty isn’t a collectible. It is the joyous discovery of the enlarged sense and state of being that is the change of heart induced by the presence of a work of art.
March 2010 -
Rec Room: Meakin Armstrong: Seijun Suzuki
The greatest living filmmaker you’ve never heard of.
March 2010 -
Norman Solomon: War in a Box
You can’t keep a war in a box any more than you can deliver a government in a box.
March 2010 -
Rec Room: David Xia: Paul Romer on Charter Cities
His talk might sound fantastical and nuts at first, but Romer may have a valid point...
March 2010 -
Andy Kroll: Ponzi Nation: How Get-Rich-Quick Crime Came to Define an Era
Welcome to America, sucker.
March 2010 -
Rec Room: Elizabeth Onusko: Rex Ray: Art + Design
An exuberant survey of the artist’s career.
March 2010 -
Robert Reich: Bail Out Our Schools
Over the longer term, incentives must be shifted away from financial capital toward human capital.
March 2010 -
Rec Room: Katherine Dykstra: The Pride
That the conversations about The Pride have mostly been concerning the confusion about the story’s setting is a shame, as the ideas that drive the play are important.
March 2010 -
Carole Joffe: The Billboard Circus and the Abortion Wars
The only lesson to be drawn from this whole mess appears to be that the abortion wars show no signs of abating.
March 2010 -
Rec Room: Alex Smith: The Art of Construction
Should architecture be a blank wall that we stare at as we pass by, or an interactive surface that is as much designed as it is ever-changing?
March 2010 -
Michelle Alexander: The New Jim Crow: How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste
Racial caste is alive and well in America.
March 2010 -
Rec Room: Joel Whitney: Burma VJ
This Oscar-nominated documentary is one of those works where the process of making it is as extraordinary as the film itself.
March 2010 -
Robert Reich: Why the Continuing Bad Job Numbers Make it Harder (But Even More Important) To Pass Health Care Reform
Americans desperately need health care reform. They also desperately need jobs. Even if it’s difficult for many to make the connection, it’s still possible for the nation to try to do two important things at the same time.
March 2010 -
Rec Room: Alex Halperin: E-Reading
I have been borrowing my girlfriend’s Barnes & Noble Nook for more and more of my trips...
March 2010 -
John Feffer: Pacific Pushback: Has the U.S. Empire of Bases Reached Its High-Water Mark?
The current pushback in Japan is the surest sign yet that the American empire of overseas military bases has reached its high-water mark and will soon recede.
March 2010 -
Rec Room: Kristen Brunelli: Jim the Boy
As we were (or are?) in what has been called the second Depression, a read like this is immensely enjoyable, necessary, and important.
March 2010 -
Tom Engelhardt: How to Fight a Better War (Next Time)
Three fixes for the American way of war.
March 2010 -
Rec Room: Francis Reynolds: “The Hack”
How Gabriel García Márquez discovered the ways in which “the novel and journalism are children of the same mother.”
March 2010 -
Steven Hill: The Myth of Europe’s High Taxes
Americans pay just as much—and receive far less in benefits.
March 2010 -
Rec Room: Erica Wright: Fur
This imaginative film is touched with just the right amounts of humor and pathos.
March 2010 -
Norman Solomon: War Politics: Numb and Number
Many in Congress who say they don’t support the war keep voting to fund it—and keep their voices muffled.
March 2010 -
Rec Room: Meakin Armstrong: Mercury Theatre on the Air
Orson Welles, the true king of all-media.
March 2010 -
Margaret Regan: A Shallow Grave in the Desert
It seems no matter how many walls are built to keep migrants out of Arizona, they keep coming. And the more miles are built, the more people die.
February 2010 -
Joel Whitney: Haitian History As Told by Madison Smartt Bell
A truthier take on Haiti’s past.
February 2010 -
Rec Room: Catherine Foulkrod: It’s Not Funny: Laughter as Ululation in Beckett and Moore
Sometimes we laugh when we mean to cry.
February 2010 -
Michael T. Klare: Avatar, the Prequel: Earth’s Last Stand
Klare’s imaginings of scarce resources and international strife on Earth in 2144 stay uncomfortably true to the direction in which we’re headed today.
February 2010 -
Rec Room: David Xia: The Maltese Falcon
The plot is secondary. It’s the characters and the mood that drive this film noir.
February 2010 -
Jake Whitney: Money Talks: How Advertising Has Hurt Everyday American Life
The effects of advertising in the U.S. conveys a powerful and disturbing message: nothing is as important as the almighty dollar.
February 2010 -
Rec Room: Alex Halperin: Boomsday
Satire that tours a gallery of Washington types: pompous politicians, corrupt aides, venal lobbyists, venal and horny holy rollers.
February 2010 -
Tom Engelhardt: Explain Something to Me: Fixing What’s Wrong in Washington… in Afghanistan
Why does a country that is convinced it’s becoming ungovernable think itself so capable of making another country governable?
February 2010 -
Rec Room: Alex Smith: Contemplating the Void
Artists and architects bring the Guggenheim’s iconic void to life.
February 2010 -
Dana Sachs: Learning from Past Mistakes: Operation Babylift and the Haitian Orphan Debate
Placing Haitian children in loving homes may indeed seem like a happy story among so many tragic ones, but adoption remains a complicated process.
February 2010 -
Adaeze Elechi: Back Into the Pit
Don Belton’s “Voodoo for Charles,” is a moving depiction of the lesson my father taught me to fight to save loved ones from the trappings of poverty.
February 2010 -
Robert Reich: A Thought on Evan Bayh and Partisan America
Partisan anger undermines the capacity of American democracy to do the public’s business.
February 2010 -
Rec Room: Rachel Somerstein: Artists in Government
Contrary to popular belief, they are just as capable as anyone else in public office.
February 2010 -
Norman Solomon: Dollars for Death, Pennies for Life
No shortage of bombs in Afghanistan; a lethal shortage of tents in Haiti. Such priorities—actual, not rhetorical—are routine.
February 2010 -
Nicholas Sautin: On “The Pleasure of Flinching”
Further reading and viewing suggestions from the author.
February 2010 -
Luc Sante: Modern Art
On the melancholic nature of Impressionist postcard photography.
February 2010 -
Rec Room: Katherine Dykstra: Irm
Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beck’s combined sound and energy is a complete success.
February 2010 -
Steve Fraser: The New Deal in Reverse
How the Obama Administration ended up where Franklin Roosevelt began.
February 2010 -
Jay Walljasper: Who Says Public Opinion Makes Tax Hikes Impossible?
Votes in Oregon show taxes are popular when invested in public services, and when the rich pay their share.
February 2010 -
Rec Room: Austin Allen: The First Poets: Lives of the Ancient Greek Poets
Michael Schmidt’s depictions of the poets in this collection of biographies are so compelling that you’ll want to seek out their work, making First Poets twenty recommended books in one.
February 2010 -
Adele Barker: Disaster’s Aftermath
If the disasters themselves are not preventable, sometimes the way we handle the aftermath is.
February 2010 -
Rec Room: Elizabeth Onusko: Herb & Dorothy
Part history and part love story, this documentary is perfect for Valentine’s Day.
February 2010 -
Rec Room: David Xia: The Smartest Guys in the Room
When you’re hungry for tales of hubris, greed, and corporate drama…
February 2010 -
Robert Reich: Who’s Killing Financial Reform?
Congress isn’t doing a thing about Wall Street because it’s in the pocket of Wall Street.
February 2010 -
Rec Room: Jake Whitney: “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”
Penned in 1964 with the ‘50s political climate in mind, Hofstadter’s influential essay has an uncanny relevance today.
February 2010 -
Norman Solomon: Don’t Call It a “Defense” Budget
For the United States, an epitaph on the horizon says: “We had to destroy our country in order to defend it.”
February 2010 -
Rec Room: Francis Reynolds: “Writers, Plain and Simple”
Gender imbalances in publications and prize lists make it no easier for female authors to be recognized for their work and to make a living as writers.
February 2010 -
John Sevigny: Twilight of the West
Anselm Kiefer’s grim 1980s painting resonates with the West’s past, present, and possible future.
February 2010 -
Rec Room: Erica Wright: The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine
Mark Yakich’s poems are like state fairs—they offer amusement but also moments that will stop you cold.
February 2010 -
Robert Reich: Our Incredible Shrinking Democracy
It seems as if more and more decisions that should be made democratically are being shunted off somewhere to a few people who make them in back rooms.
February 2010 -
Rec Room: Alex Smith: Interactive Spaces
Have we lost a sense of each other in buildings?
February 2010 -
Tom Engelhardt: Seven Days in January: How the Pentagon Counts Coups in Washington
American life is being sacrificed to the very infrastructure meant to provide this country’s citizens with “safety.” That’s what seven days in January really means.
February 2010 -
Rec Room: Kristen Brunelli: A 1920s Valentine’s Eve
This Valentine’s season, immerse yourself in the swingin’ ‘20s.
February 2010 -
Rec Room: Katherine Dykstra: The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009
The writers’ wise observations make this collection worthwhile.
January 2010 -
Robert Reich: Obama Needs To Teach the Public How To Get Out Of the Mess We’re In
If the public learns the wrong set of lessons, there’s no hope for getting wise policies out of Congress.
January 2010 -
Rec Room: Meakin Armstrong: Harpo Speaks! and My Wicked Wicked Ways
Neither book requires its readers to be a fan of the star—and that’s why they are great reads.
January 2010 -
Anand Gopal: Obama’s Secret Prisons
Night raids, hidden detention centers, the “Black Jail,” and the dogs of war in Afghanistan.
January 2010 -
Adele Barker: Jaffna Rebuilds: After the Tsunami in Sri Lanka
After the war and after the tsunami, Jaffna, Sri Lanka is ready for peace.
January 2010 -
Rec Room: David Xia: Random Family
Adrian LeBlanc takes us into a world where the most relevant forms of currency other than cold, hard cash are heroin and bodies.
January 2010 -
Luc Sante: Hooliganism and Literature
David Carluccio produced the sort of thing that sits unsold in bookstores for years, and then suddenly is changing hands for four figures, and eventually cannot be obtained at all unless some major collector dies.
January 2010 -
Rec Room: Elizabeth Onusko: The American Painter Emma Dial
This novel stares at the most frustrating experience an artist can have and renders it honestly.
January 2010 -
Robert Reich: Obama’s Tiny Jobs Ideas for Main Street, A Big Spending Freeze for Wall Street
Like Clinton’s, Obama’s package of middle class benefits is small potatoes. They’re worthwhile but they pale relative to the size and scale of the challenge America’s middle class is now facing.
January 2010 -
Rec Room: Austin Allen: How Fiction Works
If you like good criticism, deprive yourself no more and read this book.
January 2010 -
Rec Room: Adaeze Elechi: Efuru
Though the Western world has seriously damaged Africa, I have its education to thank for my freedom as a woman.
January 2010 -
Rec Room: Francis Reynolds: Alan Lomax in Haiti
These recordings of Haiti are more than just music—they are documents from a long-gone era.
January 2010 -
Carole Joffe: Health Reform, Violence, and Blanket Warmers: The Status of Abortion on Roe v. Wade Day
Nearly 40 years after Roe v. Wade, the struggle for abortion rights continues.
January 2010 -
Rec Room: Alex Smith: Public Urban Architecture
If you haven’t yet, take a stroll through the High Line.
January 2010 -
Rebecca Solnit: Covering Haiti: When the Media Is the Disaster
The media in disaster bifurcates. Some step out of their usual “objective” roles to respond with kindness and practical aid. Others bring out the arsenal of clichés and pernicious myths and begin to assault the survivors all over again.
January 2010 -
Rec Room: Alex Halperin: State by State
States are weird political entities and it's hard to know more than a few well. Thumbing around this book is a great way to see the country.
January 2010 -
Work for Guernica: Advertising Sales Associate
We are looking for an experienced advertising sales associate to sell ads to run on Guernica’s website and in our twice-monthly newsletter.
January 2010 -
Rec Room: Erica Wright: Poetry’s Welcoming Faces
There are amazing writers who can make converts of even the most staunch opponents of verse.
January 2010 -
Robert Reich: Bad Job Numbers and the Secret Second Stimulus
The president should spend more time talking about creating jobs. How issues are framed for the public makes all the difference.
January 2010 -
Rec Room: Michael Archer: The Disappointment Artist
Some of the smartest and most entertaining takes on culture.
January 2010 -
Ira Chernus: Martin Luther King’s Legacy and Israel’s Future: Stepping Beyond Fear
Pushing past the self-serving misinterpretations of King’s words.
January 2010 -
Rec Room: Kristen Brunelli: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Life and adventure through the eyes of an autistic hero.
January 2010 -
Robert Reich: Why Obama Must Take On Wall Street
What happened to all the tough talk from Congress and the White House early last year? Why is the financial reform agenda so small, and so late?
January 2010 -
Joel Whitney: Noam Chomsky: The Point Stands—Nick Cohen is a Maniac Who Never Cites Sources
In asking Chomsky what I thought was a provocative challenge question, I’m afraid I gave Cohen too much credit.
January 2010 -
Dilip Hiro: Regime Change in Tehran? Don’t Bet on It…Yet
What today’s Iranian opposition movement can learn from the 1979 Revolution.
January 2010 -
Rec Room: Meakin Armstrong: The Magical Key
I wandered around, and thumbed through the remaindered bestsellers and out-of-date guidebooks, when I came across The Magical Key. This particular edition had the illustrations by Maurice Sendak and its afterword was by W.H. Auden. What was this book?
January 2010 -
Ada Limón: Listen
When you live with a veteran, the language of war becomes a natural thing.
January 2010 -
Rec Room: Katherine Dykstra: Tim Burton
For the lovers of dark magic, Tim Burton’s strange and unusual world awaits you at MoMA...
January 2010 -
Robert Reich: The Last Big Question: Will Health Care Reform Be Paid For By The Rich or the Middle Class?
It’s bonus time on Wall Street again. But the middle class is taking a beating.
January 2010 -
Rec Room: David Xia: In the Graveyard of Empires
How was pantyhose a strategic tool in combat operations? And why did Pakistan’s president try to get the Japanese prime minister to star the leader of the Taliban in a Honda motorcycle ad campaign? In the Graveyard of Empires has the answers.
January 2010 -
David Chura: Sexual Abuse in Juvenile Detention Centers
The numbers are disturbing. During 2008 through 2009, 12 percent or 3,220 of the kids locked up in state or privately run juvenile detention centers reported that they had been sexually victimized by another kid or by facility staff.
January 2010 -
Rec Room: Elizabeth Onusko: Kandinsky
Can’t make it to the Guggenheim before the Kandinsky retrospective closes? There are other ways to experience the extraordinary artist...
January 2010 -
Orville Schell: The Melting of America: The Story of a Can’t-Do Nation
A comprehensive list of what works and what doesn’t in America.
January 2010 -
Rec Room: Michal Zamir: Recipe for a Perfect Day
On a sunny winter’s day, live like Mrs. Dalloway.
January 2010 -
On Attempted Bombings, Airline Security, and Privacy
Frederick S. Lane: Is it in our best long-term interests to yield more and more control over our private information to the government in the equally futile pursuit of perfect security?
January 2010 -
Robert Reich: What’s Ahead for the Economy and Politics in 2010
If it looks like jobs aren’t coming back, that we may be stuck with a high level of joblessness for years, voters will take out even more of their anxieties on Democrats next November.
January 2010 -
Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse: An American World of War: What to Watch for in 2010
For Americans, 2010 could be the year of the assassin.
January 2010 -
Tom Engelhardt: In Nightmares Begin Responsibilities: Why War Will Take No Holiday in 2010
As for peacemaking or de-escalation next year, fuggedaboutit…2010: pure loss.
December 2009 -
Norman Solomon: Flares in the Political Dark
Mobilization of progressive movements to pressurize Obama in the White House and Democrats on Capitol Hill has always been essential. It hasn’t happened. Instead, among Democratic loyalists, reflexive support for the latest line from the administration has made it easier for Obama to move rightward.
December 2009 -
John Sevigny: On Francisco Goya
That Goya was a better painter than the earlier, more popular Peter Paul Rubens, or a more intelligent artist than Diego Velazquez, Michelangelo or Rembrandt hardly seems worth mentioning. That he created the Black Paintings, and The Dog, the most thoroughly modern piece in the group, in utter solitude, is food for thought in this age of Artistic Prostitution.
December 2009 -
Robert Reich: Slouching Toward Health Care Reform
In all likelihood, the White House and the Dems eventually will get a bill they can call "reform," but they will not be able to say with straight faces that the reform is a significant improvement over the terrible system we already have.
December 2009 -
William Powers: Snowflakes in Copenhagen
His Excellency Dasho Nado Rinchen of Bhutan outlined his country’s official national development focus: instead of the purely economic gross national product (GNP), he said, they track and pursue gross national happiness (GNH), a more holistic goal.
December 2009 -
Rec Room: Alex Halperin: Hard Eight
Watch it for a peak at one of the most emotionally bombastic directors before he completely found his footing, or just for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s fantastic cameo.
December 2009 -
Rec Room: Erica Wright: Let the Right One In
This film is a haunting consideration of what vampirism might look like without the dietary alternatives of Tru Blood or deer meat.
December 2009 -
William Powers: In the Thick of It
It goes without saying that Obama and the other leaders who arrive in Copenhagen this week will have their fingers pressed upon the pulse of domestic political opinion. So in a very real sense, what happens here is up to you.
December 2009 -
Rec Room: Alex Smith: Invictus
Invictus is a stunning representation of South Africa in the 1990s, and, for the first time, I feel the need to understand the game of rugby.
December 2009 -
Rec Room: Meakin Armstrong: Steve Erickson
His plots take wild turns, and in some ways, reading him is like careering down an alley in a cab driven by a drunk.
December 2009 -
Rec Room: Adaeze Elechi: The Woman Who Walked into Doors
It’s a beautiful thing when a writer can disappear entirely as his/her characters leap completely to life. Bravo, Roddy Doyle!
December 2009 -
Robert Reich: How a Few Private Health Insurers Are on the Way to Controlling Health Care
From the start, opponents of the public option have wanted to portray it as big government preying upon the market, and private insurers as the embodiment of the market. But it's just the reverse.
December 2009 -
Norman Solomon: Mr. President, War Is Not Peace
In Afghanistan, after 30 years under the murderous twin shadows of poverty and war, the only lifeline is peace. From President Obama, we hear that peace is the ultimate goal. But "peace" is a fixture on a strategic horizon that keeps moving as the military keeps marching.
December 2009 -
Rec Room: Austin Allen: Paul Simon: Lyrics 1964-2008
This book of lyrics warns not to treat Simon as Bob Dylan’s Garfunkel.
December 2009 -
Rec Room: Joel Whitney: Andrew Sullivan
Sullivan stuns, satisfies, and raises some important questions.
December 2009 -
Robert Reich: The President's Jobs Initiative Doesn't Measure Up
No president in modern times walks a tightrope as exquisitely as this one. His balance is a thing of beauty. But when it comes to this economy right now -- an economy fundamentally out of balance -- we need a federal government that moves boldly and swiftly to counter-balance the huge recessionary forces still at large.
December 2009 -
Rec Room: Elizabeth Onusko: Contemporary Holiday Music
There is hope yet for the genre.
December 2009 -
Carole Joffe: Personal Tragedies and Public Cruelties: Speaking Out Against the Stupak-Pitts Amendment
The Stupak-Pitts amendment, if it becomes incorporated into an eventual health reform measure, would have the effect of further eroding insurance coverage of abortion, ultimately affecting those even with private insurance.
December 2009 -
Rec Room: Alex Smith: The Yiddish Policeman’s Union
This story of a community preparing to lose ownership of their land is a testament to Chambon’s talent and ability to create a new world.
December 2009 -
Bill McKibben: The Physics of Copenhagen: Why Politics-As-Usual May Mean the End of Civilization
The best human analog to the role physics is playing here may be fascism in the middle of the last century. There was no appeasing it, no making a normal political issue out of it. You had to decide to go all in, to transform the industrial base of the country to fight it, to put other things on hold, to demand sacrifice.
December 2009 -
Rec Room: Francis Reynolds: Field Notes on Democracy
Arundhati Roy asks us to rethink the goals of occupation, the rule of the markets, where we get our news, and, perhaps most originally, innocence.
December 2009 -
Barbara Ehrenreich: Not So Pretty in Pink: The Uproar Over New Breast Cancer Screening Guidelines
What we really need is a new women's health movement, one that's sharp and skeptical enough to ask all the hard questions. What we don't need, no matter how pretty and pink, is a ladies' auxiliary to the cancer-industrial complex.
December 2009 -
Rec Room: Alex Halperin: The Art of Eating
Fisher is less concerned with the provenance of food than the pleasures derived from it, and her prose is a joy.
December 2009 -
Rec Room: Erica Wright: Cara B
Proceed with caution, but do proceed to Jorge Drexler’s infectious album.
December 2009 -
Norman Solomon: The Hollow Politics of Escalation
At the core of enabling politics is inner space that's hollow enough to reliably cave under pressure. Typically, Democrats with antiwar inclinations weaken and collapse at push-comes-to-shove moments on Capitol Hill. The habitual pattern involves loyalty toward -- and fear of -- "the leadership."
November 2009 -
Rec Room: Meakin Armstrong: The Adventures of Augie March
“Since graduating school, no book has impressed me as much as Augie March.”
November 2009 -
Robert Reich: The Housing Crisis and Wall Street Shame
Shame? If we've learned anything over the last year, it's that Wall Street has none.
November 2009 -
Rec Room: Joel Whitney: The Idea of Justice
Sen’s work can be applied to so many debates going on around us, which he wisely leaves to us.
November 2009 -
Rebecca Solnit: Learning How to Count to 350: Remembering People Power in Seattle in 1999 and Berlin in 1989
If communism failed 20 years ago, then capitalism staggered 10 years ago in Seattle, and fell to its knees a year ago when our "wall" on Wall Street collapsed. One large question remains as we face a climate-changing world: If capitalism and communism both failed, what's the alternative?
November 2009 -
Rec Room: David Doody: Falconer
He fell and beat his head on the floor, trying to achieve the reasonableness of pain. Pain would give him peace. When he realized that he could not reach pain this way, he began the enormous struggle to hang himself. He tried fifteen or a million times before he was able to get his hand on his belt buckle…
November 2009 -
Rec Room: Elizabeth Onusko: The Selected Levis
The Selected Levis feels complete in a way that most selecteds don’t.
November 2009 -
Robert Reich: Harry Reid, and What Happened to the Public Option
The public option proposed by Harry Reid is a token public option, an ersatz public option, a fleeting gesture toward the idea of a public option, so small and desiccated as to be barely worth mentioning except for the fact that it still (gasp) contains the word "public."
November 2009 -
Rec Room: Erica Wright: La Femme Nikita
This TV series is done like a good spy drama: no flashy special effects, just film noir twists.
November 2009 -
Robert Reich: The Great Disconnect Between Stocks and Jobs
The Fed and the Teasury have, in effect, placed a huge bet on a recovery driven by asset prices. That's a bad bet. The great disconnect between the stock market and jobs is pushing stock prices way out of line with the real economy. This isn't sustainable.
November 2009 -
Rec Room: Alex Halperin: Common Ground
A masterful look at ordinary people overtaken by historic events.
November 2009 -
Norman Solomon: Biggest State Party to Obama: Get Out of Afghanistan
Many of the California Democratic Party leaders who voted to approve the out-of-Afghanistan resolution on Nov. 15 have come to see the touted reasons for the U.S. war effort as specious, the mission as Sisyphean and the consequences as profoundly unacceptable.
November 2009 -
Rec Room: Alex Smith: A Collaboration with Nature
Land artist Goldsworthy achieves geometrical perfection from nature’s imperfect materials.
November 2009 -
Kristen French: Nabokov, Resurrected
Written at the very end of Nabokov's life, The Original of Laura was interred, in notecard form, in a Swiss vault after Nabokov's death in 1977. Despite his instructions that his wife Vera burn it, she disobeyed. When she died, the decision fell to Nabokov's son Dmitri, who resolved last year to have it published.
November 2009 -
Rec Room: Francis Reynolds: Of Walking in Ice
In the winter of 1974, Werner Herzog learned that his good friend had fallen ill in Paris, so he grabbed a jacket, compass, and duffel bag and began walking the 500 miles from Munich to Paris…
November 2009 -
Listen: Interview with November's Guest Fiction Editor
The Reporter's Notebook interviews Guernica's Guest Fiction Editor Amitava Kumar about the Asian American Literary Festival happening tomorrow, November 14.
November 2009 -
Rec Room: Adaeze Elechi: Good Hair
If you ever wonder why a black woman might flinch when you try to touch her hair, Good Hair can help you better understand.
November 2009 -
Rec Room: Meakin Armstrong: Emil Cioran
Read him for the same reason you might drink whiskey neat: to brace you and awaken your senses.
November 2009 -
Norman Solomon: The War Stampede
Disputes are raging within the Obama administration over how to continue the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. A new leak tells us that Washington's ambassador in Kabul, former four-star general Karl Eikenberry, has cautioned against adding more troops while President Hamid Karzai keeps disappointing American policymakers. This is the extent of the current debate within the warfare state.
November 2009 -
Robert Karp: Who Owns the Land?
Although often privately owned, farm land must be treated as a commons.
November 2009 -
Rec Room: Elizabeth Onusko: Art Forms in Nature
“I don’t so much read the book as stare at its pages—the illustrations are spellbinding.”
November 2009 -
David Chura: Life Terms for Minors are 'Cruel and Unusual Punishment'
The American people need to realize that the "super-predators" they've been taught to fear are first and foremost children, and the United States Supreme Court needs to see to it that no more children are denied the right to change and are protected against the "cruel and unusual punishment" of a slow death in prison.
November 2009 -
Rec Room: David Doody: What is the What
It’s hard to believe that so much can happen to one person and he can live to tell about it.
November 2009 -
Je Banach: What It Means to be Hungry
How Jonathan Safran Foer's "Eating Animals" Makes a Case for Much More Than Vegetarianism.
November 2009 -
Robin Yassin-Kassab: Our Shared Godstuff
The fact that God uses human myths to talk to humans need not perturb the religious. "wa tilka al-amthal nadribuha lil-nas la'alahum yatafakiroon," says the Qur'an. "We rehearse these parables to people in order that they may think." From a religious perspective, the rehearsal of myths in sacred text is proof of God's understanding of human minds. And where do the myths arise from anyway? From unforgotten events, and from us, from our shared Godstuff.
November 2009 -
Rec Room: Austin Allen: Voices & Visions
For the true poetry lover, it does not get any better than this.
November 2009 -
Dahr Jamail and Sarah Lazare: Where Will They Get the Troops?: Preparing Undeployables for the Afghan Front
As the Obama administration debates whether to send tens of thousands of extra troops to Afghanistan, an already overstretched military is increasingly struggling to meet its deployment numbers. Surprisingly, one place it seems to be targeting is military personnel who go absent without leave (AWOL) and then are caught or turn themselves in.
November 2009 -
Norman Solomon: The Next Phase of Healthcare Apartheid
People who scrape together enough money to buy health insurance will discover that they're riding in the back of the nation's healthcare bus. The most "affordable" policies will be the ones with the highest deductibles and the worst coverage.
November 2009 -
Rec Room: Alex Smith: Shaun of the Dead
Not a fan of the hair-raisers? Opt for something a bit more ridiculous.
November 2009 -
Robert Reich: How Obama Can Convince Congress to Enact a Larger Stimulus, and Why He Must
If job numbers aren't moving in the right direction by the mid-terms elections Blue Dog Dems will be more politically endangered then than if they vote for a larger stimulus now.
November 2009 -
Rec Room: Francis Reynolds: Breece D'J Pancake
Pancake’s measured language evokes so many emotions with so few words.
November 2009 -
Barbara Ehrenreich: The Swine Flu Vaccine Screw-up: Optimism as a Public Health Problem
Vaccines can be tricky and less than maximally profitable to manufacture. They go out of style with every microbial mutation, and usually it's the government, rather than cunning direct-to-consumer commercials, that determines who gets them. So it should have been no surprise that Big Pharma approached the H1N1 problem ploddingly.
November 2009 -
Rec Room: Alex Halperin: The Magicians
Grossman is exceptionally skilled at blending the tropes of fantasy with the conventions of slacker culture.
November 2009 -
Robert Reich: Health Care Reform is Critically Important, But Getting Americans Back to Work is More So
Obama's focus on health care rather than jobs, when the economy is still so fragile and unemployment moving toward double digits, could make it appear that the administration has its priorities confused.
November 2009 -
Rec Room: Erica Wright: The Awakening
“I blame James Fenimore Cooper for rampant literary disinterest in the United States.”
November 2009 -
Roy DeCarava (December 9, 1919 - October 27, 2009)
Photographer Roy DeCarava dies at 89.
October 2009 -
Rec Room: Adaeze Elechi: Passing
Terrible things happen in Passing, but it’s a fascinating look into human relationships and the whole complicated business of race and identity.
October 2009 -
Event: The Guernica at 5! Benefit
Be the first to buy your ticket to the Guernica Benefit on October 28 in Brooklyn and win a chance to see Andrew Bird live in Philadelphia.
October 2009 -
Rec Room: Meakin Armstrong: What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us
Laura van den Berg’s writing is spare and elliptical. Large topics are broached, but quietly and the stories stay with you.
October 2009 -
Q & A With Matthea Harvey
As Tin House Books makes its foray into children's book publishing with The Little General and The Giant Snowflake, Associate Editor Tony Perez sits down with the book's author, Kingsley Tufts winner and National Book Critics Circle Award nominee Matthea Harvey.
October 2009 -
Michael T. Klare: Welcome to 2025
American preeminence is disappearing fifteen years early.
October 2009 -
Rec Room: Austin Allen: The Little Disturbances of Man
Who wouldn’t rather read Paley’s “An Interest in Life” than Faulkner’s dour “A Rose for Emily”?
October 2009 -
Robert Reich: Too Big to Fail: Why The Big Banks Should Be Broken Up, But Why The White House and Congress Don't Want To
Like a giant, gawking adolescent who's just discovered he can crash the Lexus convertible his rich dad gave him and the next morning have a new one waiting in his driveway courtesy of a dad who can't say no, the big banks will drive even faster now, taking even bigger risks.
October 2009 -
Rec Room: Alex Smith: The Triplets of Belleville
Finally, it’s cool to watch cartoons again.
October 2009 -
Norman Solomon: Uncle Sam in Afghanistan: Good Help Is Hard to Find
The Obama administration and congressional leaders -- with Sen. John Kerry playing a starring role in recent days -- are making a determined effort to legitimize the Afghan government as a prelude to further U.S. escalation of the war.
October 2009 -
Jo Comerford: Cashing in the War Dividend
Let's sing the praises of perpetual war. We better, since right now every forecast in sight tells us that it's our future.
October 2009 -
Rec Room: Michael Archer: Elvis Perkins in Dearland
“123 Goodbye” is poetry that inspires poetry.
October 2009 -
Robert Reich: Why Obama Has to do What Letterman Did: Refuse to Pay Hush Money
If Obama doesn't weigh in forcefully and say "no" to the hush money for Big Pharma, big insurance, and the AMA, America's middle class will get walloped. And if the walloping starts before 2012, Sarah Palin or some other right wing-nut populist will wallop Obama.
October 2009 -
John Sevigny: On Roy DeCarava
Roy DeCarava: chronicler of his own Harlem; eye-poet of the hardscrabble streets where he was born; master at printing subtle variations between black, pitch black, and pitch blacker.
October 2009 -
Rec Room: Adaeze Elechi: Nigeria 70
Put on your dancing shoes and hop into this green-white-green time machine.
October 2009 -
Robert Reich: More Desperation from the Right
The right-wing blogosphere seem interested in a talk I gave in September, 2007 to students in a political science class here at Berkeley, in which I played the role of a presidential candidate so politically incorrect and tone-deaf as to pummel every sacred cow in sight. In their desperation they have proven the whole point of my lecture.
October 2009 -
Rec Room: Meakin Armstrong:The Skeptic’s Dictionary
Designed to point out the many logic flaws in American daily life, this book is a weapon. It will teach you how to think.
October 2009 -
Rec Room: Elizabeth Onusko: Taller Children
Taller Children is so enjoyable because it avoids monotony—rather than linger in a single emotional zone, it continuously alternates between effervescence and melancholy.
October 2009 -
Barbara Ehrenreich: Are Women Getting Sadder? Or Are We All Just Getting a Lot More Gullible?
Barbara Ehrenreich dismantles a recent study about the supposed declining happiness of American women and the flurry of response around it blaming feminism for the blues.
October 2009 -
Staff Pick: Austin Allen
Italo Calvino’s experimental novel If on a winter’s night a traveler aims to amuse and arouse.
October 2009 -
The Nobel Prize and President Obama's Legitimacy Problem on the Left
Note to the president: you should have dealt with our feelings about the guy who had the job before you.
October 2009 -
Staff Pick: Francis Reynolds
Tsai Ming-Liang uses the isolation of the cinema experience to beautiful and unsettling ends.
October 2009 -
Tom Engelhardt: War of the Worlds: London, 1898; Kabul, 2009
President Obama, Afghan War commander Stanley McChrystal, and special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke should put aside their focus on counterinsurgency and counterterrorism and focus instead on H.G. Wells's 111 year-old novel, The War of the Worlds -- and on the thought that we might actually be the Martians of the twenty-first century
October 2009 -
Robert Reich: Why Obama Should Not Have Received the Peace Prize -- Yet
Had the world not suffered eight years of George W. Bush, Obama would not be receiving the Prize. He's prizeworthy and praiseworthy only by comparison.
October 2009 -
Robert Reich: So Much Happening in Washington and So Little To Show for It, So Far
In each of these areas -- healthcare, financial regulation, environment, and jobs -- the "better" is really not that much better. Forget perfect; anything that offered real reform would suffice for now. But in every case, what should be the centerpieces of reform are being left out.
October 2009 -
Staff Pick: Kyle McAuley
In the face of success, indie and prog rockers act out through their music.
October 2009 -
Staff Pick: Alex Smith
Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo will draw you into a world of mysticism, faith, suspicion and excellent storytelling.
October 2009 -
Robert Reich: Specifically, What Should Be Done For Jobs?
With the debt ceiling approaching and the gravitational pull of the 2010 elections increasing, the White House can't go back to Congress with a formal bill to enlarge the stimulus package. Here are four simple steps that would help small businesses, public schools, childrens' health, and average working people.
October 2009 -
J. Malcolm Garcia: Afghanistan Today, Where the Taliban is 'The Opposition'
With the war in Afghanistan occupying the news, Congress, and President Obama, J. Malcolm Garcia offers this dispatch from Kabul.
October 2009 -
Norman Solomon: Starting Another Year of War in Afghanistan
While certainty is lacking, steely resolve is evident. An unspoken mantra remains in effect: When in doubt, keep killing. The knotty question is: Exactly who and how?
October 2009 -
Staff Pick: Adaeze Elechi
Think of this recommendation as a dubious meal which has turned out to be so surprisingly delicious that I feel it would be quite unfair for you not to enjoy it with me.
October 2009 -
Staff Pick: Joel Whitney
Eighty years of Sartoris: what Faulkner and García Márquez have in common.
September 2009 -
John Feffer: Afghanistan: NATO's Graveyard? Is the Transatlantic Alliance Doomed?
Damned if it does and damned if it doesn't, NATO will limp along much as the British and Soviet empires did after their misadventures in Central Asia. These were, after all, dead empires walking. NATO may be in this category as well. It just doesn't know it yet.
September 2009 -
J.C. Hallman: The Disciplined Soul
Seamus Heaney reminds us that a writer's life means "the disciplining of a habit of expression until it becomes fundamental to the whole conduct of a life." The Story About the Story is full of such-disciplined souls.
September 2009 -
Staff Pick: Austin Allen
If Oscar Wilde wrote stories in which characters got devoured by wild animals, the result would look a lot like the works of Saki.
September 2009 -
Robert Reich: The Public Option Lives On
Despite resistance to it, the public option lives on. It's still in the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pension bill. It still headlines the House bills, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she's still committed to it. The latest Times/CBS poll shows 65 percent of the public in favor of it.
September 2009 -
Staff Pick: Elizabeth Onusko
Usher in autumn with a spell-binding classical composition.
September 2009 -
Arundhati Roy: What Have We Done to Democracy?
Of Nearsighted Progress, Feral Howls, Consensus, Chaos, and a New Cold War in Kashmir.
September 2009 -
Staff Pick: Erica Wright
An author’s solitary retreat is interrupted by a sinister mystery.
September 2009 -
Watch: Collaborative Animation by Blu and David Ellis
A collaboration between artists David Ellis and Blu has produced one of the coolest things I've seen lately on the internet.
September 2009 -
J.C. Hallman: 'KAFKA? I LOVE KAFKA. HE'S VERY - KAFKAESQUE.'
The battle over permissions can be a tough one.
September 2009 -
Cherien Dabis talks Amreeka, anti-Arab racism and the USA
The debut filmmaker talks about her film Amreeka with Laura Flanders on GriTtv.
September 2009 -
Watch: Will Ferrell Calls for the Protection of Health Insurance Executives
Will Ferrell and some other caring celebrities have, thankfully, spoken up for those who may not otherwise be heard.
September 2009 -
Robert Reich: Why the Dow is Hitting 10,000 Even When Consumers Can't Buy And Business Cries 'Socialism'
The Dow is up because of the very thing so many executives are complaining about, which is government's expansion. The problem is, our newly expanded government isn't doing much for average working Americans.
September 2009 -
Staff Pick: Francis Reynolds
This hectic novel of a mind unhinged is both hilarious and horrifying, like Gogol’s madman let loose in a violent and corrupt Central America.
September 2009 -
J.C. Hallman: Heal The Lung
The essays collected in The Story About the Story assault the institution of literary criticism.
September 2009 -
David Bollier: Ending the Free Market Hoax
House reclaims student loan program from profligate banks.
September 2009 -
Thomas N. DeWolf: Jimmy Carter, Joe Wilson, and Racism in America
Not everyone who opposes Obama's policies is a racist, but there is racism at play here as former President Carter suggested. Of course there is. It is deeply rooted.
September 2009 -
Robert Reich: Why Olympia Snowe Should Vote Against the Baucus Plan
I don't know about you, but I'm hoping the Senator from Maine votes no next week. If she does, America has a fighting chance of getting real healthcare reform.
September 2009 -
Tom Engelhardt: War Is Peace
The way this country has grown used to its now seemingly unending wars and the immense, intense preparations for more of the same begs the question, Is America hooked on war?
September 2009 -
Dennis Pacheco: Marijuana Arrests For Year 2008: 847,864
What would happen if we took all that money being flushed away for law enforcement, court costs, and the cost of imprisoning hundreds and thousands of otherwise law-abiding Americans, and spent it on, I don't know, just about anything else?
September 2009 -
Staff Pick: Meakin Armstrong
Unleash your inner comic book geek and escape to the action-packed world of Zot!
September 2009 -
Tom Engelhardt: The Washington Influence Machine
Any administration arriving in Washington wanting to do anything these days walks into a blizzard of money from special interests, not to speak of the fact that the wind at its back, the campaign wind that got it there, was already blowing strong with similar contributions.
September 2009 -
J.C. Hallman: Driving The Stake
My squabbles with literary critics had to that point been only border skirmishes where a siege, a campaign, a war, was needed. I needed to drive a stake into the dead beating heart of the Beast, and leave him rotting in his coffin.
September 2009 -
Dennis Pacheco: How Wall Street Won the War on Main Street
Despite the Government's largesse and populist outrage none of the understood reforms to Wall Street happened.
September 2009 -
Robert Reich: The Continuing Disaster of Wall Street, One Year Later
Will the President succeed on financial reform? I wish I could be optimistic. His milktoast list of proposed reforms is inadequate to the task, even if adopted, and Wall Street's major banks have been made more dangerous by their sure knowledge that they are too big to fail.
September 2009 -
Staff Pick: Katherine Dykstra
Hope Edelman’s The Possibility of Everything, a journey through her early days of being a wife and mother, is both hilarious and resonant.
September 2009 -
Staff Pick: Elizabeth Onusko
O’Hara’s seismographic recordings of motion on paper are at once sculptural and poetic.
September 2009 -
Watch: Guernica Contributor Norman Solomon on C-SPAN
Guernica contributor Norman Solomon recently appeared on C-SPAN to discuss his recent fact-finding trip to Afghanistan and escalation of the war.
September 2009 -
Robert Reich: The Final Sprint for Health Care Has Now Begun, and Where the White House is Placing Its Bets
The more you can make your voices heard, the more likely it is that the race will be won by the public rather than the private interests.
September 2009 -
Tom Engelhardt: Rebecca Solnit, 9/11's Living Monuments
Based on her new book, A Paradise Built in Hell, in which she offers a radically different vision of how people react to disasters -- they don't panic, they don't scream, they don't look helplessly to governments for aid, they begin to organize themselves -- Solnit offers us September 11th, 2001 through fresh eyes in a new moment in our history.
September 2009 -
Staff Pick: Erica Wright
If you can’t make it to her reading on Monday, you should probably get your hands on Adrienne Rich’s masterpiece, Diving Into The Wreck.
September 2009 -
David Doody: The Same Old Thing
The right's rhetoric today is the same as it ever was.
September 2009 -
Staff Pick: Kyle McAuley
Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement speech skips the usual fluff and gets to the heart of the matter.
September 2009 -
Robert Reich: The Snowe Job, and Why a 'Trigger' for a Public Option is Nonsense
If the idea is to have a public option waiting in the wings in case private insurers blow it, why wait for it at all? If it gets lower costs and wider coverage, it should be included right from the start.
September 2009 -
Staff Pick: Francis Reynolds
One of Argentina’s best writers tells an unsettling ghost story set in an unfinished apartment building.
September 2009 -
Norman Solomon: Men with Guns, in Kabul and Washington
All over Kabul, men are tensely holding AK-47s; some are pointing machineguns from flatbed trucks. But the really big guns, of course, are being wielded from Washington, where administrative war-making thrives on abstraction. Day to day, it can be easy to order the destruction of what and who remain unseen.
September 2009 -
Tom Engelhardt: Afghanistan by the Numbers: Measuring a War Gone to Hell
Imagine for a moment what might have happened if Americans had decided to sink the same sort of money we have put into war efforts in Afghanistan -- $228 billion and rising fast -- the same "civilian surges," the same planning, thought, and effort (but not the same staggering ineffectiveness) into reclaiming New Orleans or Detroit, or into planning an American future here at home.
September 2009 -
Staff Pick: Michael Archer
What comedy should ensue when the Queen of England (previously a non-reader) visits a mobile library and (gasp!) borrows a book?
September 2009 -
Staff Pick: David Doody
These books’ fearless lack of periods will get your pulse racing!
September 2009 -
John Sevigny: Ansel Adams Strikes Out
Ansel Adam's goal was no less than to save the American landscape through photographs -- no small endeavor -- and his efforts eclipsed those of 1,000 Al Gores. When he ventured outside of his comfort zone, though, into deeper political waters to document Japanese-American internment the result is closer to US Government propaganda.
September 2009 -
Norman Solomon: A Little Girl in Kabul
If rhetoric were reality, the war in Afghanistan would be about upholding humane values. But rhetoric is not reality.
September 2009 -
Robert Reich: What Obama Must Demand from Congress on Health Care
Obama can't rely solely on his exceptional rhetorical skills. He'll need to twist arms, cajole, force recalcitrant members to join him, threaten retribution if they don't come along, and, most importantly, he'll need to be specific.
September 2009 -
Staff Pick: Jordan Hirsch
The Looming Tower is a must read for those who wish to understand the forces at play which culminated in 9/11.
September 2009 -
Robert Reich: The Guns of August, and Why the Republican Right Was So Adept at Using Them on Health Care
What we learned in August is something we've long known but keep forgetting: The most important difference between America's Democratic left and Republican right is that the left has ideas and the right has discipline.
August 2009 -
Staff Pick: Adaeze Elechi
Tony d’Souza’s The Konkans is a moving, hilarious, and seductive immigrant’s tale.
August 2009 -
Dennis Pacheco: WATCH: Howard Dean & Rep. Moran Health Care Town Hall in Reston, VA
Howard Dean spoke with Rep. James Moran (D-VA) at a health care town hall in Reston, VA, and C-Span's cameras were there to capture it.
August 2009 -
Robert Reich: Beware Authoritative 'Inside Washington' Sources Who Say The Public Option is Dead
Forget the authoritative sources. Mobilize and organize. We can get comprehensive, meaningful health care reform if we push hard enough.
August 2009 -
Norman Solomon: The Afghanistan Gap: Press vs. Public
This month, a lot of media stories have compared President Johnson's war in Vietnam and President Obama's war in Afghanistan. The comparisons are often valid, but a key parallel rarely gets mentioned -- the media's insistent support for the war even after most of the public has turned against it.
August 2009 -
Staff Pick: Swetha Regunathan
Two friends—Rochel (an Orthodox Jew) and Nasira (a Muslim)— share something in common beyond teaching at the same school in Brooklyn.
August 2009 -
Philip C. Winslow: Evictions in Sheikh Jarrah
As a word, "Judaize" is slightly less cumbersome than "de-Palestinianize," but the intent and the effects are the same.
August 2009 -
Staff Pick: Erica Wright
Engaging and inspiring books to help sharpen your poetic craft.
August 2009 -
Staff Pick: Francis Reynolds
Throughout this excellent poetry collection, four very different poets sing quietly of the world around them, raise their voices in anger at injustices, and never stop digging.
August 2009 -
Staff Pick: Adaeze Elechi
The art showcased in Futr Wrld is honest about one thing: no matter what happens to the planet, people will always survive by CTRL+ALT-ing their environment.
August 2009 -
Staff Pick: Elizabeth Onusko
I understand that the Kindle has its place. But when I hear “experts” extol of the virtues of California’s recent decision to use electronic textbooks...I find myself wondering why our culture seems to value that which is novel without asking a few questions first.
August 2009 -
John Sevigny: On Canvas, Authority Unleashed: Caravaggio's Taking of Christ
As art critic Robert Hughes wrote, "There was art before [Caravaggio], and art after him, and they were not the same."
August 2009 -
Staff Pick: Katherine Dykstra
Colson Whitehead takes us through teen-aged Benji’s coming of age over a partially-unsupervised summer at Sag Harbor in 1985.
August 2009 -
Robert Reich: How Tough is Our President?
The widening gap between admiration for Obama and cynicism about his policies also reinforces passivity in Obama's base, which makes it even harder to advance a specific agenda.
August 2009 -
Kath Weston: The Homeless Readers of Tokyo
For those who cannot imagine living without books, the search for something to read can rank right up there with the search for medicine, housing, and food.
August 2009 -
Staff Pick: Meakin Armstrong
Set in Sri Lanka, A Disobedient Girl is heart-wrenching and jubilant.
August 2009 -
Robert Reich: The Public Option's Last Stand, and the Public's
Without a public, Medicare-like option, health care reform is a bandaid for a system in critical condition.
August 2009 -
Staff Pick: Jordan Hirsch
Author Robert Wright attempts to depolarize the religion debate.
August 2009 -
Robert Reich: Obama's Second Biggest Test
Reforming Wall Street, and why early indications aren't hopeful.
August 2009 -
Staff Pick: Adaeze Elechi
This album of fingerstyle guitar compositions is genuine and youthful, and you can hear that Giacomo Fiore has poured himself into each pluck of each string.
August 2009 -
Robert Reich: Sarah Palin's Death Panels
In her short time on the public stage, we've come to expect this sort of thing from Governor Palin. But listen to other Republicans these days -- and if you can bear it, tune in to right-wing Hate Radio -- and you'll hear more of the same.
August 2009 -
Tom Engelhardt: Biking Out of Iraq
On troops that don't depart, experts who never leave the scene, an Air Force that suddenly wasn't there, and a war that no longer deeds a justification.
August 2009 -
Video: The politics of Jesus; Jeff Sharlet's The Family
Sharlet tells Jon Stewart that right-wing members of the Family, the secret order of Christian fundamentalists embedded in Washington, cite Mao, Stalin and Hitler as those who best understood the New Testament.
August 2009 -
Norman Solomon: When the Dead Have No Say
The victims of war are hardly seen as people by the numbed sophisticates who can measure just about anything but the value of a human life.
August 2009 -
Staff Pick: Kyle McAuley
Spike’s new violently entertaining show combines science and wit to satisfy your deep-seated curiosity concerning one weapon’s dominance over another.
August 2009 -
Robert Reich: How To Fight Heathcare Fearmongers and Demagogues
The President needs to get specific about what he's for and what he's against in order to take back the discussion from Republican Astroturfers.
August 2009 -
Staff Pick: Erica Wright
Okay, so all poets are obsessed with death, but Thomas James is intimate, and that intimacy leads to insight rather than self-pity.
August 2009 -
Freedom Now: Move of Gen. Than Shwe a Clear Violation of Burmese and International Law
Freedom Now deplores Burma's conviction and sentencing of democracy leader Aung San Suu Kye and filed a petition to UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.
August 2009 -
Letters: Readers (and the web) Respond to Mark Dowie’s “Food Among the Ruins ” and his vision to expand Detroit’s urban farming
In response to Mark Dowie ’s August 1 “Food Among the Ruins ”, a smattering of responses came from readers and around the web, including Treehugger, Freakonomics, and the Detroit Free Press.
August 2009 -
Staff Pick: Swetha Regunathan
Set in 1930-40s India, there are no frills or golden endings in this understated, moving film—only the promises we all wish we could keep.
August 2009 -
Kristen French: Mixing Mediums--Fiction on Video
Book trailers have been around for years, but for fiction, they're catching on slowly. There's a good reason for that.
August 2009 -
Robert Reich: How the White House's Deal With Big Pharma Undermines Democracy
When an industry gets secret concessions out of the White House in return for a promise to lend the industry's support to a key piece of legislation, we're in big trouble. That's called extortion.
August 2009 -
Watch: Jeff Sharlet on Bill Maher (Video)
Jeff Sharlet discusses "The Family," also known as the "Christian Mafia," and their thoughts on the chosen ones with Bill Maher.
August 2009 -
Staff Pick: Adaeze Elechi
Not only is this book a man’s disassembling and reassembling of himself, and his struggle to maintain sanity; it is also a glimpse into Nigeria’s days of tumultuous infancy.
August 2009 -
Frederick S. Lane: C-Street, Privacy, and the Separation of Church and State
Whatever peccadilos and prayers occur in C Street can (and should) stay in C Street; public service does not completely destroy personal privacy. But what is in the hearts and minds of Family members when they publicly swear an oath to uphold the Constitution is not a private matter.
August 2009 -
Robert Reich: Astroturf Along American Highways, and the Republican Plan
Vans carrying the logo "Americans for Prosperity," meant to demonize healthcare reform, are not grassroots efforts in some ideological fight. They are Astroturf--carefully-crafted and market tested--from a party that is looking for power and nothing else.
August 2009 -
Staff Pick: Katherine Dykstra
My friend said The Hurt Locker had been called the most realistic Iraq war film made thus far. And I believe her.
August 2009 -
Video: The healthcare ad CNN won't play
The disputed healthcare ad targets Cigna CEO's high salary.
August 2009 -
Norman Solomon: The Incredible Shrinking Healthcare Reform
While the healthcare policy outcomes are looking grim, the supposed political imperatives are fueling the desires of Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill to produce a victory that President Obama can tout as healthcare reform. The likely result is a glide path to disaster.
August 2009 -
Jordan Hirsch: Dreaming about Iran
Can engagement with Iran and support for its democratic dissidents be more than a fantasy?
August 2009 -
Staff Pick: Elizabeth Onusko
In City of Thieves, Lev and Kolya risk their lives for a cake and a second chance.
August 2009 -
David W. Moore: Gallup's Anti-Health Care Bias
Pick the polls that support your position. There are plenty for whatever views you might have.
August 2009 -
Staff Pick: Meakin Armstrong
In The Children’s Hospital, Earth suffers an apocalyptic flood. Nothing exists anymore; no life, except for a floating children’s hospital, protected by angels...
August 2009 -
Staff Pick: Jordan Hirsch
Prisoners depicts Goldberg’s journey from being a heady, idealistic Zionist who dropped out of Penn to enlist in the Israeli Defense Forces, into a disillusioned, embittered soldier manning Israel’s infamous Ketziot prison camp during the first Palestinian uprising.
August 2009 -
Staff Pick: David Doody
Marlon James’s John Crow’s Devil is a haunting account of Gibbeah, a remote Jamaican town in the 1950s. James is a gritty writer whose prose can have you squirming in your seat.
August 2009 -
Staff Pick: Michael Archer
Jonas has converted to Islam and recently been sequestered. In exactly thirty-one hours, he is supposed to commit an act of terrorism in the New York City subway. Kinda gutsy, no?
August 2009 -
Staff Pick: Elizabeth Onusko
The poems in Darcie Dennigan’s debut collection, Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse, radiate.
July 2009 -
David Doody: So, Glenn Beck, Obama is a 'White Guy' Who 'Has a Deep-Seated Hatred for White People'?
These people -- Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly -- simply say things to make people look at them; to make people watch and listen to their shows.
July 2009 -
Chalmers Johnson: Three Good Reasons To Liquidate Our Empire, And Ten Steps to Take to Do So
(1) We can no longer afford our postwar expansionism; (2) we are going to lose the war in Afghanistan and it will help bankrupt us; and (3) we need to end the secret shame of our empire of bases, the exploitation of subject or local populations living in proximity to them (especially women).
July 2009 -
Staff Pick: Swetha Regunathan
From Laos to America: a family’s story of war, separation, tragedy, and reunion.
July 2009 -
Wikileaks: The Spy Who Billed Me Twice
From Guantanamo to your doorstep: the intelligence industry's revolving cash door.
July 2009 -
David Doody: Franken and Klobuchar Speak Out at Senate Judiciary Committee Vote
Senators Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken "spewed fire" and "threw brimstone" in yesterday's Senate Judiciary Committee vote on Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.
July 2009 -
David Doody: Watch: Bill Maher on America's Profit Problem (Video)
Bill Maher's new rule: Not everything in America needs to make a profit.
July 2009 -
Robert Reich: The Future of Universal Health Care, as of Now
Every day that goes by without a vote in the House or Senate on universal health care makes it less likely that major reform will occur, meaning next fall we get something called "universal health insurance" that still leaves millions of Americans uninsured and doesn't substantially slow the meteoric rise of health-care costs.
July 2009 -
Staff Pick: Erica Wright
No matter how much you badger me, I am not wading into War and Peace this summer. But novellas! Oh, novellas are like mint juleps on an August afternoon.
July 2009 -
Staff Pick: Kyle McAuley
The Planet Earth box set is one of the best possible uses of that hard-earned $37.99 you have lying around underneath the cushions of your couch.
July 2009 -
John Sevigny: Twenty Years later: David Wojnarowicz' buffalo photograph
David Wojnarowicz' buffalo photograph is a work of entirely American art, made for a culture that millions of people believed was being driven over a cliff by its president.
July 2009 -
The Cove: Flipper meets the Bourne Identity?
A new documentary exposes a little town with a knack for slaughtering dolphins.
July 2009 -
Robert Reich: The Wall Street Rally: Watch Your Wallets
The corporate profits pushing the stock market upward are coming, most notably, from payroll cuts, not because consumers have suddenly found themselves with more money, a "push" that is not sustainable and certainly not a recovery.
July 2009 -
Staff Pick: Joel Whitney
This Harper’s article describes how the system is so deliberately skewed to deny accountability that we began to conflate economic fantasy with reality, to the point where now we can hardly distinguish our own spin.
July 2009 -
Norman Solomon: Spinning Healthcare: A Bad Case of Vertigo
The kind of arguments heard during the early '60s against guaranteed healthcare for the elderly can now be heard against establishing a comprehensive single-payer system. But now, the healthcare debate is trapped between a political establishment that doesn't want a single-payer system and news media that insist on ignoring its real potential.
July 2009 -
Reese Erlich: Iran and Leftist Confusion
When I returned from covering the Iranian elections recently, I was surprised to find my email box filled with progressive authors, academics and bloggers who had concluded that the current unrest there must be sponsored or manipulated by the U.S. That comes as quite a shock to those risking their lives daily on the streets of major Iranian cities fighting for political, social and economic justice.
July 2009 -
Staff Pick: David Doody
If you’re a fan of The Wire then you will want to get yourself the novels of Price and Pelecanos (who write for the show). These novels are as gritty as any episode.
July 2009 -
David Bollier: Art, God and Copyright
Is it appropriate to copyright divinely inspired expression?
July 2009 -
Staff Pick: Adaeze Elechi
At the end of the day, the characters in GraceLand desire the same things as everyone else: warm meals, a comfortable bed to sleep in, and the freedom to be who they are.
July 2009 -
Tom Engelhardt: Borrowed Time, The World at 65
A history of my father's time and mine from the turn of the last century through three world wars (including the Cold War).
July 2009 -
Staff Pick: Katherine Dykstra
From its playful beginning to its horrific climax and heartening denouement, the acting, the music, the dialogue in Ruined all work together to achieve a story as politically powerful as it is simple.
July 2009 -
Robert Reich: Obamacare Is At War With Itself Over Future Costs
As opposition to universal health care shifts away from industry and toward Blue Dog and moderate Democrats who are increasingly worried about future deficits it's time for the President to begin twisting arms and knocking heads.
July 2009 -
Wikileaks: Big Trouble in Little Paradise: the Turks and Caicos Islands takeover
WikiLeaks has released a suppressed report laying at the center of UK plans to seize direct control of the Turks & Caicos Islands, a popular Caribbean tourist destination and tax haven.
July 2009 -
Norman Solomon: Beyond the Hype: Cronkite and the Vietnam War
Reporting that a war can't be won, after cheerleading it for years, should not be seen as the ultimate in journalistic quality and courage. That critique says a war is bad only because it's not winnable, which does nothing to challenge the prerogatives of military expansion.
July 2009 -
Staff Pick: Jordan Hirsch
Leebaert makes the case in To Dare and to Conquer that special operations and the qualities that define them—ingenuity, speed, and audacity—have not only decided battles, but have swung the history of civilizations.
July 2009 -
Staff Pick: Meakin Armstrong
Available again, is Robert Mitchum’s performance in The Friends of Eddie Coyle as an aging gunrunner forced by circumstances to snitch on his criminal “friends. ”
July 2009 -
Ann Jones: Everything That Happens in Afghanistan Is Based on Lies or Illusions
Fixer is a film that captures some edgy and fearful truths and is the best documentary I've seen on Afghanistan.
July 2009 -
Tom Engelhardt: On Escalation
In an ongoing assessment of the devolving situation in Afghanistan the Obama Administration will undoubtedly resort to troop escalation. Too bad no one's escalating the diplomacy.
July 2009 -
Friend Pick: Hasdai Westbrook
I highly recommend that you go out and nab a copy of American Parent whether you’re a parent, want to be one or would run a mile in the opposite direction at the sight of a stork.
July 2009 -
Frederick S. Lane: Bachmann's Anti-Census Fear-Mongering is Nothing New
As Judge Sonya Sotomayor noted in her response to questioning by Senator Al Franken, the U.S. Constitution is a mixture of broad principles and specific commands. The latter puts Rep. Michelle Bachmann on dubious legal ground in regards to her decision to only answer certain Census questions in 2010.
July 2009 -
WikiLeaks: Nuclear Accident in Iran May Lay Behind Mystery Resignation
The head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, Gholam Reza Aghazadeh has resigned under mysterious circumstances, which may have to do with a serious nuclear accident.
July 2009 -
Staff Pick: Michelle Mounts
I find myself challenged by the messy explosion that happens when I press cyborgism and Buddhism together. Who is to say what enlightenment actually looks like in the twenty-first century?
July 2009 -
Robert Reich: Goldman and JPMorgan -- The Two Winners When The Rest of America is Losing
We've ended up with two giants that now have most of the casino to themselves, are playing with poker chips backed by taxpayers, and have a big say in what the rules of the game are to be. Where are the antitrusters when we need them?
July 2009 -
David Doody: Why Attaching the Hate Crimes Prevention Act to the Defense Bill Makes Sense
The defense and security of our country should not be limited to just some of the citizens of the country, but should instead be extended to everyone.
July 2009 -
Staff Pick: Erica Wright
When Doug Burr’s Thing About Trouble came on two winters ago, I had that immediate connection certain songs engender.
July 2009 -
David Doody: An Experiment in Web Serialization
The Forecast 42 Project: One man's experiment to get away from the usual submission process.
July 2009 -
Robert Reich: The House: Tax the Wealthy to Keep Everyone Healthy
To say out loud, as the House has just done with the universal health care bill, that those in our society who can most readily afford it should pay for the health insurance of those who cannot is, well, audacious. There's also another word for it: fair.
July 2009 -
Staff Pick: Francis Reynolds
Elias Khoury: “Beirut’s past is not of stability, but of violent change. Everything is open, uncertain. In my fiction [Yalo], you’re not sure if things really happened, only that they’re narrated. What’s important is the story, not the history.”
July 2009 -
Robert Reich: Goldman's Back, and Why We Should Be Worried
Now that Goldman Sachs has posted record earnings as revenue from trading and stock underwriting reached all-time highs, less than a year after the firm took $10 billion from taxpayers, you can expect them to revert to their old ways in politics if their old ways in the market backfire again.
July 2009 -
David Bollier: Even Dead Celebrities Sell
Ad Nauseam chronicles the manipulative pathologies of advertising culture.
July 2009 -
Staff Pick: Swetha Regunathan
To watch Contempt now (whether for the first time or the tenth time) in the fallout of savage capitalism is to reconsider its beautifully drawn dilemma: how can art survive the onslaught of industry?
July 2009 -
Robert Reich: The Health Care Clock, and Why Obama Has to Act Quickly
Universal health care is so complicated -- touching on so much of the economy, stepping on the toes of so many vested interests -- that to allow the bills to languish past recess risks the entire goal. Speed is essential.
July 2009 -
Philip C. Winslow: Angola's Forgotten War, Squandered Peace
Angola's decades-long terror often was called "the worst war in the world." The description never seemed overstated. Today, though it is the seventh leading supplier of oil to the U.S., instability still plagues the country.
July 2009 -
Staff Pick: Michael Archer
Inflating a Dog’s inventive tale is touching and, in spots, hilarious, and Peter and his mother’s journey and quest for fame call to mind Don Quixote.
July 2009 -
Staff Pick: Kyle McAuley
You notice, as you pass your local art house theater, that Food, Inc. is playing alongside a Jacques Rivette picture, whose name you recognize from a French New Wave class you took in college. You find the prospect of reading subtitles for four hours an unbearable anathema, so you buy a thirteen-dollar ticket to Food, Inc., which is just about to start...
July 2009 -
Staff Pick: Adaeze Elechi
The Neverending Story will make you remember the reality of fantasy when you begin to ask yourself some of the questions posed to Atreyu and Bastian Balthazar Bux.
July 2009 -
Staff Pick: Joel Whitney
On the life and mysterious death of a legendary wildlife filmmaker in Africa.
July 2009 -
Norman Solomon: Escalation Scam: Troops in Afghanistan
"Escalation" is a word for a methodical process of acclimating people at home to the idea of more military intervention abroad -- nothing too sudden, just a step-by-step process of turning even more war into media wallpaper.
July 2009 -
Guernica writer E.C. Osondu wins the 'African Booker'
E.C. Osondu's story in Guernica, Waiting, won the so-called African Booker—the Caine Prize for African Writing.
July 2009 -
Staff Pick: Elizabeth Onusko
Matt & Kim’s Grand will put you in a good mood even if you don’t want to be in one.
July 2009 -
Staff Pick: Katherine Dykstra
In this film, the director uses her father, First Amendment attorney Martin Garbus, as a lens through which to explore four freedom of speech cases tried over the course of American history.
July 2009 -
Tom Engelhardt: Will What We Don't Know (or Care to Know) Hurt Us?: Mourning Michael Jackson, Ignoring the Afghan Dead
Michael Jackson's death has little to do with us, but the death of so many Afghan people are, or should be, our responsibility, part of an endless war the American people have either supported or not stopped from continuing. And yet one is a screaming global headline; the others go unnoticed.
July 2009 -
John Sevigny: Photography Must Die
The 21st Century photographer can learn more studying the collected work of Claude Monet, Francisco Goya, Jackson Pollock, or Anselm Kiefer than by aping the photographic vocabulary force fed to us.
July 2009 -
Staff Pick: David Doody
Sometimes there’s nothing better than nonfiction in a poet’s hands.
July 2009 -
Scores killed in China protest (Audio & Video)
A reported 140 people were killed and more than 800 were injured in a violent clash in China. One BBC reporter in Shanghai says this was “one of the most serious clashes between the authorities and demonstrators in China since Tiananmen Square in 1989.”
July 2009 -
Staff Pick: Jordan Hirsch
When we discuss subjects like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and issues involving questions of Jewish identity, we often devote attention to the intricacies and neglect to address a far more obvious, yet challenging question: Who is a Jew?
July 2009 -
Staff Pick: Meakin Armstrong
Padgett Powell’s Edisto, which takes place within sight of a beach, isn’t a difficult read—it’s propulsive and written with a light hand—but it's also rife with all those harder topics that make the book worthwhile.
July 2009 -
Staff Pick: Swetha Regunathan
Edited by Jeffrey Eugenides, My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead is a quiet, yet powerful collection of great love stories, from Chekhov to Munro. These are stories which search for and lose love.
July 2009 -
Staff Pick: Francis Reynolds
Tawada’s novel doesn’t hesitate to explore complex issues of identity and representation in an image-saturated world, but what has stayed with me the most is how her prose beautifully embodies her young character’s fragile and preoccupied state of mind.
July 2009 -
VIDEO: Glenn Beck wants many Americans to be killed in a terrorist attack (or his guest does)
Is Beck's guest's call for a terrorist attack from Osama bin Laden at all like shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater?
July 2009 -
Staff Pick: Erica Wright
Hardwick defies genre in this lyric memoir/novel, championing the sentence above all else. NYRB Classics did us all a favor when they resurrected Sleepless Nights from the out-of-print graveyard in 2001.
July 2009 -
Norman Solomon: Abstract Quality Journalism for War
No amount of newsprint or airtime can do more than scratch the human surface of war, especially when the media lenses are ground with ideology, nationalism, and economic convenience.
July 2009 -
Dahr Jamail: Refusing to Comply: The Tactics of Resistance in an All-Volunteer Military
As the war in Iraq and Afghanistan drag on, some people in the US military find their voices, dissent, and resist.
July 2009 -
Staff Pick: Kyle McAuley
What’s so thrilling about Cloud Atlas is how complete it feels not in spite but because of this narrative fragmentation. Instead of collapsing under the weight of its own invention, Cloud Atlas breathes and thrives like a collection of living voices.
July 2009 -
Staff Pick: Michelle Mounts
This wicked little volume reminds me of Poe’s The Tell-tale Heart and Gogol’s Diary of a Madman... Your discomfort as a reader is author John Hawkes’s triumph.
June 2009 -
Staff Pick: Michael Archer
What makes The Bubble worth watching is the way it exposes the complex lives and realities of Palestinians and Israelis and makes us pose questions about our own humanity.
June 2009 -
Dilip Hiro: The Clash of Islam and Democracy in Iran
Until the June 12th election, post-Shah Iran seemed to indicate that Islam and democracy could work in harmony. The upheaval has demonstrated that when strains between the two develop, democracy gets short shrift.
June 2009 -
Staff Pick: Adaeze Elechi
I recommend Asa’s self-titled debut album because there are some things that are too stunning not to be shared.
June 2009 -
Staff Pick: David Doody
There’s a lot of talk these days about vampires. Vampire movies, vampire books, vampire sex symbols. Well, you can keep your vampires. I’ll take werewolves over those bloodsuckers any day, thank you very much. And while we’re at it, I’ll take my story about werewolves written in verse, please.
June 2009 -
Staff Picks: Meakin Armstrong
If you thought the excerpt Sarverville Remains was good, you should probably try The New Valley.
June 2009 -
Roya Hakakian on Neda
Every revolution needs icons and symbols -- an image that embodies a sense of universality of blight and at the same time innocence.
June 2009 -
Staff Pick: Katherine Dykstra
The short stories in Nothing Right all revolve around midwestern women in complicated relationships, both familial and romantic.
June 2009 -
Staff Pick: Joel Whitney
Synecdoche New York is a brilliant film that is sad, strange, illuminating, funny, epic, and totally original.
June 2009 -
Norman Solomon: Full-Spectrum Idiocy: GOP and Chavez on Iran
When approaching Iran, the Republican Party line and the Hugo Chavez line are running in opposite directions -- but parallel. The leadership of GOP reaction and the leadership of Bolivarian revolution have bought into the convenient delusion that long-suffering Iranian people require assistance from the U.S. government to resist the regime in Tehran.
June 2009 -
Ex-detainees allege US, Afghan abuse (video)
According to the BBC, as the Obama administration takes action to shut down Guantanamo, a detention facility in Bagram (a US military base in Afghanistan) expands. Ex-detainees talk to the BBC about their time at Bagram.
June 2009 -
Staff Pick: Swetha Regunathan
Nothing comes easy in O’Neill’s complex novel—neither dreams nor lengthy jaunts through a New York populated by “others.”
June 2009 -
Robert Reich: Why the Critics of a Public Option for Health Care Are Wrong
Without a public option, the other parties that comprise America's non-system of health care -- private insurers, doctors, hospitals, drug companies, and medical suppliers -- have little or no incentive to supply high-quality care at a lower cost than they do now.
June 2009 -
Greg Grandin: Touring Empire's Ruins, From Detroit to the Amazon
To truly grasp how far America has fallen from the heights of its industrial grandeur -- and to understand how that grandeur led to stupendous acts of folly -- you should tour a set of ruins far from the Midwest rustbelt; they lie, in fact, deep (and nearly forgotten) in, of all places, the Brazilian Amazon rainforest.
June 2009 -
Staff Pick: Jordan Hirsch
As the crisis in Iran has unfolded, one book has received numerous mentions across the blogosphere: Amir Taheri’s The Persian Night: Iran under the Khomeinist Revolution.
June 2009 -
Joel Whitney: All About Iran
A recap of some of the more in-depth, recent cultural coverage of Iran, and some other reasons Americans might be so fascinated by this story--besides our self-evident altruism.
June 2009 -
Abortion debate on 'Daily Show' (video)
Republican political commentator Mike Huckabee returns to The Daily Show to debate abortion.
June 2009 -
Staff Pick: Elizabeth Onusko
When poet Paul Guest, who was paralyzed in an accident as a child, writes of his condition in My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge, he is simultaneously blunt, frenzied, grief-stricken, and humorous.
June 2009 -
David Doody: Media Matters: 'Some conservative media figures defend Obama's response to events in Iran' (Video)
Media Matters for America has compiled a list of conservative commentators who have different opinions than some Republicans on President Obama's response to the events taking place in Iran.
June 2009 -
Zoya Phan: Thailand Forcing Karen Refugees Back to Burma
Up to 6,000 Karen have fled a new military offensive by the Burmese Army and its allies, the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army. Most have fled to Thailand. Now that there is less fighting in some places, Thai authorities apparently want the refugees to return to Burma.
June 2009 -
Watch: Waltz with Bashir Movie Trailer (Video)
Watch the trailer for Waltz with Bashir, a graphic novel and animated documentary film by Ari Folman, that was featured on Guernica's blog in January.
June 2009 -
Robert Reich: Memo to the President: What You Must Do To Save Universal Health Care
There are many things the President must do to make universal health care a reality, including putting all other agenda items on hold and actually fighting back against those who have chosen to take up this fight against him.
June 2009 -
Does Iranian citizen journalism report or distort?
Maybe the US's credibility in places like Iran is cause enough for caution. A video plus some Guernica interviews about Iran.
June 2009 -
Robert Reich: Does the Obama Plan for Reforming Wall Street Measure Up?
The White House's so-called reform does very little in the way of actual reform and will allow Wall Street to return to business as usual, which will, sooner than later, result in a repeat of the great meltdown of 2007 and 2008.
June 2009 -
Norman Solomon: Obama and Anti-War Democrats
This is a crucial time for anti-war activists and other progressive advocates to get more serious about congressional politics. It's not enough to lobby for or against specific bills -- and it's not enough to just get involved at election time. Officeholders must learn that there will be campaign consequences.
June 2009 -
Charles Greene: Viva Bloomsday or Why Ulysses is the Greatest Novel Ever
As another Bloomsday has come, I feel that now is as good a time as any to make my case for why James Joyce's Ulysses is the greatest novel ever written. That's right, I did say greatest ever.
June 2009 -
Zoya Phan: My People Still on the Run in Eastern Burma
6000 Karen have been forced to flee their homes as the Burmese Army continues targeting civilians.
June 2009 -
Wikileaks: World Health Organization Study Suppressed by the U.S.
In March 1995, the WHO and United Nations Interregional Institute of Crime Investigation announced the publication of the results of a global study on cocaine, which were suppressed due to the intervention of the representative of the United States.
June 2009 -
Robert Reich: The Healthcare War is Now Official
The next weeks will show what Obama is made of -- whether he's willing and able to take on the most formidable lobbying coalition he has faced so far on an issue that will define his presidency.
June 2009 -
Michael T. Klare: It's Official -- The Era of Cheap Oil Is Over, Energy Department Changes Tune on Peak Oil
For the first time, the well-respected Energy Information Administration appears to be joining with those experts who have long argued that the era of cheap and plentiful oil is drawing to a close.
June 2009 -
Joel Whitney: New York Times as Quixote
Daily Show correspondent Jason Jones found a new use for the New York Times and for newspapers: butt of our jokes.
June 2009 -
Robert Reich: The Great Debt Scare: Why Has It Returned?
Why are the ostensibly liberal Center for American Progress and New York Times participating in the Debt Scare right now when the economy is still mired in the worst depression since the Great one, meaning the government has to create larger deficits if the economy is to get going again?
June 2009 -
Editors: Royal Dutch Shell Settles in Ken Saro-Wiwa Case
Royal Dutch Shell has reached a settlement of $15.5 million in a case brought against the oil company by the relatives of anti-oil campaigners in Nigeria who were killed in 1995.
June 2009 -
Norman Solomon: Words and War
Millions of words and factual data pour out of the Pentagon every day. Human truth is another matter, and there's plenty more media invisibility and erasure ahead for Afghan people as the Pentagon ramps up its war effort in their country.
June 2009 -
Robert Reich: How Pharma and Insurance Intend to Kill the Public Option, And What Obama and the Rest of Us Must Do
We must let our representatives and senators know we want a public option without conditions or triggers -- one that gives the public insurer bargaining leverage over drug companies, and pushes insurers to do what they've promised to do.
June 2009 -
Carole Joffe: The Legacy of George Tiller
While the response to George Tiller's death demands outrage, another response to this killing must be to demand that the mainstream medical community acknowledge the reality that there will always be some women who need abortions later on in pregnancy.
June 2009 -
David Doody: NEED, the Humanitarian Magazine: 'Screw the Man, Save the World'
NEED magazine, a humanitarian magazine based in Minneapolis, searches for an answer to declining advertising revenue.
June 2009 -
Michael Archer: Can't Get Arrested
In an interview for Guernica Magazine, published June 1, I asked Wuer Kaixi where he planned to be yesterday, the twentieth anniversary of the Tianamen Square massacre. Kaixi, who became known to world when cameras captured him scolding Chinese Premier Li Peng while wearing a hospital gown, was one of the most prominent student leaders of the uprising.
June 2009 -
Tom Engelhardt: Missing Word, Missing World: Graduating the Rest of Us, '09
Some words, like "empire," have gone MIA in our American world, and words denied mean analyses not offered, things not grasped, surprise not registered, strangeness not taken in, all of which means that terrible mistakes are repeated and wounding ways of acting in the world never seriously reconsidered.
June 2009 -
Robert Reich: The Future of Manufacturing, GM, and American Workers
As new technologies and more efficient machines continue to make many manufacturing jobs obsolete, why is the Obama Administration bailing out GM?
June 2009 -
David W. Orr: Learning to Live With Climate Change Will Not Be Enough
A leading environmentalist explains why drastically reducing carbon dioxide emissions now will be easier, cheaper, and more ethical than dealing with runaway climate destabilization later.
June 2009 -
John Sevigny: On John Divola's Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert
Few recent photographs speak as directly or eloquently about the relationship between civilization and nature as a relatively unknown black-and-white image from American photographer John Divola's series, "Dogs chasing my car in the desert."
May 2009 -
David Bollier: Throwing Good Money After Bad
Obama may be a masterful politician with the common touch, but where is the respect for ordinary citizens when his administration lets Wall Street rescue itself at our expense?
May 2009 -
William Astore: Selling Education, Manufacturing Technocrats, Torturing Souls: The Tyranny of Being Practical
Based on a decidedly non-bohemian life -- 20 years' service in the military and 10 years teaching at the college level -- I'm convinced that American education, even in the worst of times, even recognizing the desperate need of most college students to land jobs, is far too utilitarian, vocational, and narrow.
May 2009 -
Robert Reich: Sotomayor and the Republicans
Will the Republicans see going negative on Sotomayor as their only chance at slowing Obamomentum, or do they simply lack the wisdom to opt for a more sensible strategy?
May 2009 -
Fred Pearce: Consumption Dwarfs Population As Main Environmental Threat
It's overconsumption, not population growth, that is the fundamental problem: By almost any measure, a small portion of the world's people -- those in the affluent, developed world -- use up most of the Earth's resources and produce most of its greenhouse gas emissions.
May 2009 -
Robert Reich: The Only Sure Way to Fund Universal Health Care
The only way President Obama can make universal health care a reality will be to change the position he took during the presidential campaign.
May 2009 -
Robert Reich: A Modest Plan For Paying College Costs
As he gets ready to head to a commencement at the University of California Berkeley Robert Reich offers a plan to pay back college tuition, linking repayment to a fixed percent of subsequent wages for a limited number of years, enabling all graduates to follow their dreams into whatever work they want.
May 2009 -
Norman Solomon: The March of Folly, Continued
"The March of Folly," a book published 25 years ago explains, as well as anything written since, President Obama's policy towards Afghanistan--one based, as was the case in Vietnam, more on military strength than on political diplomacy or humanitarian efforts.
May 2009 -
Noam Chomsky: Why We Can't See the Trees or the Forest: The Torture Memos and Historical Amnesia
America has a long history of torture, dating back, in fact, to our earliest days as an "infant empire" as George Washington called it. Any surprise brought on by the torture memos released by the White House fails to recognize--or refuses to remember--this key factor of American history.
May 2009 -
Mia Farrow: Darfuri Voices Heard
Today, on the steps of one of our nations greatest buildings, in the company of some of our most powerful and respected leaders, Darfuri voices were heard.
May 2009 -
Philip C. Winslow: Cluster Weapons: On the Way Out
A movement to ban cluster weapons is gathering pace. It's possible that this time around the U.S., which has not used cluster munitions since 2003 in Iraq, will join, helping make the weapons and their explosive sub-munitions a military artifact.
May 2009 -
Watch: Chevron's Amazon Crude mess on 60 Minutes
When Texaco left Ecuador in 1992, it left one huge environmental mess. The result has been a suit by tens of thousands of Ecuadorians against Chevron, which bought Texaco, for $27 billion. This is the biggest environmental lawsuit in history.
May 2009 -
Robert Reich: The Health Care Cave-In
"Don't make the perfect the enemy of the better" is a favorite slogan in Washington because compromise is necessary to get anything done. But the way things are going with health care, a better admonition would be: "Don't give away the store."
May 2009 -
Jared Genser and Meghan Barron: The Trial of Aung San Suu Kyi
How will the world react to the injustice?
May 2009 -
Link Roundup
A poetry project goes on summer vacation, Obama changes his mind on military commissions, a Columbia Professor says there is no genocide in Darfur, and more.
May 2009 -
Watch: Rumsfeld confronted as war criminal for humanitarian deaths
Is this a fair use of freedom of speech? Or just obnoxious? Is Donald a war criminal?
May 2009 -
Robert Reich: The Truth Behind the Social Security and Medicare Alarm Bells
Don't be confused by these alarms from the Social Security and Medicare trustees. Social Security is a tiny problem. Medicare is a terrible one, but the problem is not really Medicare; it's quickly rising health-care costs and a system that is inefficient and wasteful.
May 2009 -
WATCH: The tortured humor debate on Jon Stewart
Stewart demonstrates the hypocrisy of right-wing torture apologias, criticizing Wanda Sykes
May 2009 -
Norman Solomon: A Progressive Challenge to Jane Harman
Marcy Winograd's race to unseat Jane Harman in California's 36th District in 2010 reflects -- and is likely to help nurture -- a growing maturity among progressives around the country who are tired of merely complaining about centrist Democrats in Congress.
May 2009 -
Nick Turse: A Woman at the Edge: Tough Times, Domestic Violence, and Economic Abuse
As part of the "Tough Times" series he has been doing on America in meltdown mode for TomDispatch.com, Nick Turse ventured into the world of domestic abuse recently and discovered what tough times can really mean for some women.
May 2009 -
Robert Reich: What Will Happen to Banks that Fail the Stress Test, When You and I Own Wall Street
The outcome of the "stress tests" will be that the banks needing extra capital will get it from the Treasury. The Treasury will simply swap debt for equity - turning what the banks owe the government into shares of stock in the banks. The question becomes, what type of shareholders should the public become?
May 2009 -
Norman Solomon: We Need a Green New Deal
Seventy-five years after the start of the New Deal, and nearly 40 years after the first Earth Day, the need for basic change on behalf of social justice and ecology is clear.
May 2009 -
Dilip Hiro: Defying the Economic Odds
In the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, a new world order is emerging -- with its center gravitating towards China. As the world melts down, China grows.
May 2009 -
Standing Before History: Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa at PEN
On May 2, as part of the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, Guernica co-presented an event honoring Ken Saro-Wiwa, Nigerian writer and environmental activist hanged by a Nigerian military court for trumped up charges.
May 2009 -
David Bollier: Who Should Own Antiquities?
The clash of justifications for property rights in ancient works of art.
May 2009 -
Standing Before History: Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa
Guernica is proud to cosponsor this night of remembrance at PEN World Voices Festival on Saturday, May 2 with Ken Wiwa, Richard North Patterson, readings by Steve Connell and Sekou, and moderated by Okey Ndibe.
May 2009 -
Robert Reich: The Auto Bailout Is Going Off the Road
There is no reason taxpayers should pay billions more to GM when they are laying off workers. The purpose of any auto bailout is to help American auto workers keep their jobs, not save an auto industry that's a tiny fragment of what it was before.
May 2009 -
Francis Reynolds: An Interview with W. J. T. Mitchell (Part 2)
The University of Chicago professor and leading image theorist on stereotypes, the presidential campaign, and the legacy of the "war on terror."
April 2009 -
Francis Reynolds: An Interview with W. J. T. Mitchell
The University of Chicago professor and leading image theorist on stereotypes, the presidential campaign, and the legacy of the "war on terror."
April 2009 -
Philip C. Winslow: Cultural Cross-Currents in the West Bank
Attempts at apolitical cultural events have been thwarted by deep-rooted and distinctly anti-modern undercurrents in the town of Jenin.
April 2009 -
Robert Reich: How Obama Can Succeed in the Next Hundred Days and Beyond
So far Obama has found a workable balance, requiring increasingly fancy footwork, and some rebalancing will be needed. The central question for the next 100 days is how deftly he finds new footing.
April 2009 -
Norman Solomon: Obama: Beyond Savior or Trickster
Rejecting Obama iconography and demonology is necessary for a healthy progressive movement. We won't get far by trying to leapfrog the actual political conditions of the country. Our task is to change them.
April 2009 -
Robert Reich: Where Government Spending Should be Trimmed -- And Why It's Necessary to Fast-Track Universal Health Care
Republicans seem hell bent on becoming a tiny, whacky minority. Obama should stop trying to court them and fast-track health care.
April 2009 -
Jan Hively: Sharing the Work, Spreading the Wealth
How the economic stimulus plan could open the way for a commons-based society.
April 2009 -
Letter to the Editors: A Response to Joel Peckham's essay 'Guided by Voices'
Zionism was not simply a response to worldwide anti-Semitism. The earliest Zionists were caught up in the colonialist and nationalist ideology of their day.
April 2009 -
David Bollier: Dozens of Roads Going Private
U.S. PIRG report documents the sell-off of public highways and construction of private toll roads.
April 2009 -
Robert Reich: We Need More Stimulus, Not More Bailout
Tim Geithner believes that the economy will be rescued when banks lend again, but most people are already carrying too much debt and don't want to borrow more money. As he prepares to return to Congress for what will be, if he even gets it, the last money Congress will give the administration, he needs to focus on stimulus rather than bailout.
April 2009 -
Roane Carey: Don't Flash the Yellow Light
Mixed messages from Washington could lead to catastrophe in Iran.
April 2009 -
Robert Reich: Why We're Not at the Beginning of the End, and Probably Not Even At the End of the Beginning
President Obama has begun urging Americans to refinance their homes so they can save money and start spending again, and the nation's biggest banks are claiming their operations are profitable this year. But, this is only because of the flood of money the Fed put into the economy, not because we've reached the beginning of the end.
April 2009 -
Philip C. Winslow: War Crimes on Trial in Sierra Leone
A journalist and foreign correspondent reflects on his time spent in Sierra Leone as, this week, three of that country's war criminals were sentenced to long prison terms for multiple war crimes and crimes against humanity.
April 2009 -
Norman Solomon: Getting a Death Grip on Memory
A recent New York Times article told of research being done on the possibility of erasing certain memories. While the research scientists are just scratching the surface in this field, American media outlets have been at it for a long time.
April 2009 -
Tom Engelhardt: Terminator Planet: Launching the Drone Wars
As you sit in that movie theater in May watching the latest installment in the Terminator series, actual unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), pilotless surveillance and assassination drones armed with Hellfire missiles, will be patrolling our expanding global battlefields, hunting down human beings.
April 2009 -
Readers respond to Aiding is Abetting: An interview with Dambisa Moyo
Democracy has almost always preceded the creation of a large middle class.
April 2009 -
Choruss: A Correction
We the editors regret any implication, in our blog that ran last Wednesday, that Choruss hoped to break or circumvent the law.
April 2009 -
Robert Reich: Why You Should Work for a Hedge Fund
The hedge fund managers who raked in billions last year wouldn't have done nearly as well had taxpayers not bailed out Wall Street to begin with. Now, these are exactly the sort of investors Tim Geithner is trying to lure in to buy troubled assets from banks, with an extraordinary offer financed by you and me and other taxpayers.
April 2009 -
Norman Solomon: Democrats and War Escalation
Obama's insistence on increasing the number of troops in Afghanistan will fracture his base inside the Democratic Party. If he insists on leading a party of war, there will be those within the party who organize to transform it into the party for peace.
April 2009 -
Letters: A Response to Guernica's Interview With Dambisa Moyo
At Guernica we love hearing what you, the reader, think about the essays, interviews, stories, and poetry we publish. Here, Frank Williams, of Industries of Africa, responds to our recent interview with African author and economist Dambisa Moyo.
April 2009 -
Robert Reich: It's a Depression
This is still not the Great Depression of the 1930s, but it is a Depression. And the only way out is government spending on a very large scale. We should stop worrying about Wall Street. Worry about American workers. Use money to build up Main Street, and the future capacities of our workfo
April 2009 -
John Sevigny: Pierre Toutain-Dorbec's 'Confronting the Past - The Aftermath of the Khmer Rouge Regime'
“Straight” portraiture is one of humanity’s oldest art forms, with the first known example made 27,000 years ago on a cave wall in France. But in spite of its long history, portraiture is one of the most difficult art forms to “get right.” The photographs of Pierre Toutain-Dorbec, like the paintings centuries before by Diego de Velazquez, do just that.
April 2009 -
The 4th Annual Asian American Writers' Workshop/Cave Canem Celebration
Guernica is proud to be collaborating with the Asian American Writers' Workshop to bring you this night of readings from Sapphire, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Jessica Hagedorn, and more.
March 2009 -
Jake Whitney: Dambisa Moyo and whether Western aid helps or hurts Africa
Is it time to re-think Western aid to Africa?
March 2009 -
Norman Solomon: These Colors Won’t Run... Afghanistan
Last week, some members of Congress sent President Obama a letter that urged him to “reconsider” his order deploying 17,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan. The list of signers was tragically short.
March 2009 -
Tom Engelhardt: Economic Dirty Bomb Goes Off in New York
With a whimper, not a bang…the old neighborhood empties.
March 2009 -
David Bollier: What the AIG Bonus Scandal Has Illuminated
The shock is not the greed, inequity and political complicity, but seeing it so starkly.
March 2009 -
Garry Leech: Troubling New Military Strategy in Afghanistan
With the NATO-led coalition in Afghanistan struggling on the battlefield against a resilient insurgency and opium poppy cultivation on the rise it has been suggested that the United States should import the counterinsurgency and counternarcotics model currently being employed in Colombia to Afghanistan. This stance fails to recognize gross violations of human rights, a massive refugee crisis and record levels of opium poppy cultivation, which have occurred as a result of Plan Colombia.
March 2009 -
Robert Reich: In the Wake of AIG: Obama's First Priority
Before it can clean up Wall Street or do much of anything else, the Administration has to clean up the way it's been trying to clean up Wall Street.
March 2009 -
Robert Dreyfuss: Killing a Chicken to Scare the Monkeys
Is the Israel lobby in Washington an all-powerful force? Or is it, perhaps, running scared?
March 2009 -
Philip C. Winslow: Benjamin Netanyahu and the Settlements
Many Palestinians and Israelis sense a gloomy déjà vu while Benjamin Netanyahu is prime minister of a rightist, nationalist Israeli government.
March 2009 -
Robert Reich: Is Obamanomics Conservative or Revolutionary?
Looking at the small picture Obamanomics can seem conservative. However, when you look at how it reverses the economic philosophy that has dominated America for over 25 years, it becomes something quite different.
March 2009 -
Wikileaks: Murder in Nairobi
Two Wikileaks-related senior human rights activists have been assassinated.
March 2009 -
March Content Launched: The Plagues
Guernica's March issue is just a click away. Mark Dowie, the Indian 9/11 meets the Indian Katrina, Islamic art, with an update, and more.
March 2009 -
David Doody: Alejandro Zambra’s Bonsai
Alejandro Zambra’s novella Bonsai is a book that seems to come about almost accidentally through its telling.
March 2009 -
Tom Engelhardt: The Imperial Unconscious
Afghan faces, predators, reapers, terrorist stars, Roman conquerors, imperial graveyards, and other oddities of the truncated American century.
March 2009 -
Wikileaks: Pentagon Pulls Strategic Communications Machine Offline
Wikileaks has cracked the encryption to a key document relating to the war in Afghanistan. The document, titled "NATO in Afghanistan: Master Narrative", details the "story" NATO representatives are to give to, and to avoid giving to, journalists.
February 2009 -
Thom Blaylock: An Idea for Immediate Stimulus
Dynamic debit cards not rebate checks or tax cuts the answer to quick capital injection into the economy.
February 2009 -
Wikileaks: UN Indicts Kenyan Police for Hundreds of Extra-Judicial Killings
Professor Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur has recommended the sacking of Kenya's Attorney General and the Police Commissioner over hundreds of extra-judicial killings.
February 2009 -
Susan Campbell: Sorry, We're Not Done Yet
It's a little too soon for a Post-Feminist World.
February 2009 -
Norman Solomon: Freeing Up Resources...for More War
In his first speech to Congress, the new president threw down a 90-month-old gauntlet, reaffirming the notion that committing to war halfway around the world will make Americans safer.
February 2009 -
Robert Reich: Obama's Goal: Halving the Budget Deficit by 2012. Really?
Does Obama's goal to cut the budget deficit in half by 2012 make sense in regards to the economic challenge we face now?
February 2009 -
John Sevigny: Miguel Rio Branco: violence and light
Trained as a painter, photographer Rio Branco renders subject and color inseparable.
February 2009 -
Tom Engelhardt: Burning Questions
What does economic "recovery" mean on an extreme weather planet?
February 2009 -
Robert Reich: Geithner's 'Stress Test' for Banks, and a Stress Test for America
Instead of rewarding executives of insolvent banks that would otherwise fail, we should be helping insolvent families for whom failure spells disaster.
February 2009 -
Wikileaks: Latest Afghan Death Data
A confidential NATO report issued last month reveals that civilian deaths from the war in Afghanistan have increased by 46% over the past year.
February 2009 -
Philip C. Winslow: Weapons of War in Gaza: Israel and International Law
Although investigations into the hyper-violent 22-day war should be done, Israel, along with all states and non-state belligerents, must go further and review the weapons they use and how they use them.
February 2009 -
David Bollier: Kudos to Wikileaks for Prying the Information Loose!
Web collective makes public thousands of Congressional Research Service reports.
February 2009 -
Robert Reich: What Geithner Needs to Do
The tab may be close to $2 trillion. But what, exactly is the plan? We still don't know.
February 2009 -
Wikileaks: Change You Can Download
Wikileaks has released nearly a billion dollars worth of quasi-secret reports commissioned by the United States Congress.
February 2009 -
Tom Engelhardt: The Empire v. The Graveyard
Whistling past the Afghan graveyard, where empires go to die.
February 2009 -
Norman Solomon: Why Are We Still at War?
We have seen and heard it proved again and again that, as retired Army general William Odom put it in 2002, "Terrorism is not an enemy...It’s about as sensible to say we declare war on night attacks and expect we’re going to win that war." And still, as we speak, the deployment orders for more troops to Afghanistan are going through the channels.
February 2009 -
Robert Reich: The Real Fight Starts After the Stimulus is Enacted
Those who support the stimulus as a desperate measure to arrest the downward plunge in the business cycle might be called cyclists. Others, including me, see the stimulus as the first step toward addressing deep structural flaws in the economy. We are the structuralists.
February 2009 -
John Sevigny: Slavery in the Sunshine State
Since 1997 -- though the very word evokes faded images of Frederick Douglas, the Underground Railroad, and overloaded ships arriving from Africa -- slavery has been making headlines and drawing sharp rebukes from farm worker advocate groups and others in Florida.
January 2009 -
Paul Rogat Loeb: Saving the world, one furnace at a time
How one purchase can make a difference instead of encouraging the same consumption for consumption’s sake that has helped create our current problems.
January 2009 -
Jimmy Carter: Hamas Can Be Trusted
The former president says that Hamas has honored its agreements with him and that during the ceasefire there were no major rocket attacks, until Israel attacked Gaza.
January 2009 -
Norman Solomon: 44 Years Later, LBJ’s Ghost Hovers Over the 44th President
Last week -- and 44 years ago -- there were many reasons to celebrate the inauguration of a president after the defeat of a right-wing Republican opponent. But in the midst of numerous delightful fragrances in the air, a bad political odor is apt to be almost ineffable.
January 2009 -
Tom Engelhardt: Waltz with Bashir
As a 19-year-old Israeli soldier, Ari Folman took part in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and was on duty in Beirut during the notorious massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Tom Engelhardt brings us an excerpt from his new graphic novel, Waltz with Bashir.
January 2009 -
Robert Reich: An Open Letter to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Michelle Malkin
In a time like this, when tempers are riding high and many Americans are close to panic about their jobs and finances, you have a special responsibility to consider the accuracy of what you say and the consequences of inflammatory and erroneous statements.
January 2009 -
Robert Reich: How America Embraced Lemon Socialism
If anyone has a good argument for why the shareholders of the losing sectors of the economy should not be cleaned out first, and their creditors and executives and directors second -- before taxpayers get stuck with the astonishingly-large bill -- let's hear it.
January 2009 -
Tony Karon: Change Gaza Can Believe In
Tearing up Washington's Middle East playbook: the unexpected opportunities the Gazan disaster opens for a new American policy in the Middle East in the Obama era.
January 2009 -
John Sevigny: Texas thugs
In one last act of disregard for the law, George W. Bush commuted the prison sentences of two Border Patrol agents, and in so doing disrespected the federal jurors who convicted them.
January 2009 -
Dustin Luke Nelson: 100 Things Americans May Not Know About the Bush Administration Record
An early draft of the recent White House release of "100 Things Americans May Not Know About the Bush Administration Record" has recently been uncovered.
January 2009 -
Norman Solomon: The Return of Triangulation
While it’s too early to gauge specific policies of the Obama presidency, certain aspects are reminiscent of Bill Clinton's presidency. Progressives need to do more than vent their disappointment. They need to be involved.
January 2009 -
John Sevigny: Port of Patras Refugee Camp
With his exhibition, Greek photographer George Poutachidis shows us refugees from Iraq and Afghanistan, driven out of their native countries awaiting a chance to get to Europe, a continent run by governments who do not want them.
January 2009 -
Robert Reich: Criteria for TARP II
What should be done with the next $350 billion of taxpayer bailout money?
January 2009 -
David Doody: On Dealing With the C.I.A.
Why does everyone wear kid gloves when dealing with the C.I.A.?
January 2009 -
Ann Jones: The Afghan Scam
The untold story of why the U.S. is bound to fail in Afghanistan.
January 2009 -
Katie Halper: Chip Saltsman and George Allen: Separated at birth?
Could RNC chair candidate Chip Saltsman be a 'chip' off the old block of former Georgia Senator George Allen?
January 2009 -
Robert Reich: The Stimulus
How to create jobs without them all going to skilled professionals and white male construction workers.
January 2009 -
Marilyn Krysl: Turning the Tide in Sri Lanka
The appointment of Tamils to certain cabinet posts would send a much-needed message of equality.
January 2009 -
Tom Engelhardt: Body Count Nation
The Ponzi scheme presidency and Bush's legacy of destruction.
January 2009 -
Robert Reich: Thoughts on the End of a Hell of a Year
This Mini-Depression is causing a lot of pain, to be sure, but it will be over in a year or three. Yet what kind of economy will we have on the other side? Will we have a more just society?
December 2008 -
Norman Solomon: A Hundred Eyes for an Eye
Even if you set aside the magnitude of Israel’s violations of the Geneva conventions and the long terrible history of its methodical collective punishment of 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza, consider the vastly disproportionate carnage in the conflict.
December 2008 -
Katie Halper: Christians, send your Jewish friends 'thank you for Christmas' greeting cards
I would like to give birth to a new holiday tradition. Forget the Happy Hanukkah cards. How about a thank you note?
December 2008 -
Katle Halper: Joe Biden Explains Rick Warren Choice
Joe Biden is never at a loss for words. Clearly this former stutterer is making up for lost time.
December 2008 -
Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen: Announcing the P.U.-litzer Prizes for 2008
Now in their seventeenth year, the P.U.-litzer Prizes recognize some of the nation’s stinkiest media performances.
December 2008 -
Guernica Editors: Announcing the 2008 Pushcart Prize Nominees
Presenting six exciting selections of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.
December 2008 -
Ira Chernus: The First Hundred Days or the Last Hundred Days?
What the president-elect should be reading.
December 2008 -
Katie Halper: Republican Idol
The Search for America's New Top Right Wing Renaissance Man (Vote Now!)
December 2008 -
Norman Solomon: The Silent Winter of Escalation
Is Afghanistan the same as Vietnam? Of course, competent geographers would say no. But the United States is the United States.
December 2008 -
John Sevigny: Mexico's Perfect Dictatorship
Bodies pile up, jobs vanish, and Mexico’s “perfect dictatorship” positions itself for a comeback.
December 2008 -
Erica Wright: The Tempter or the Tempted
If adolescent craze Twilight is pushing an abstinence agenda, what's wrong with that?
December 2008 -
Robert Reich: The Great Crash of 2008
The only way to revive Main Street is to get America back on the course of rising median incomes.
December 2008 -
Katie Halper: Bush Will Be Remembered for His Rule of Law, Sense of Justice, and Clemency (for Turkeys)
Bush is often portrayed as (and is, actually,) the governor who executed more people than any other governor in modern history. Because, like the Lord, the Bush giveth and he taketh away.
November 2008 -
Norman Solomon: The Ideology of No Ideology
No amount of flowery rhetoric or claims of transcendent non-ideology should deter tough scrutiny.
November 2008 -
Robert Reich: How Obama is Already Taking Charge
How does Obama manage to fill the leadership vacuum created by a lame-duck president and a Treasury chief who has all but punted on coming up with any workable solution to the economic crisis?
November 2008 -
Norman Solomon: A Media Parable for 'the Center'
It’s been 16 years since a Democrat moved into the White House. Now, the fog of memory and the spin of media are teaming up to explain that Barack Obama must hew to “the center” if he knows what’s good for his presidency.
November 2008 -
Marya Hornbacher: Seeing War Through Borrowed Eyes
When Megan Rye's brother returned from his tour in Iraq with over two thousand photographs marked by his uncanny skill and observation, she began painting them. The result is a nearly photorealistic series of images so quietly powerful the viewer tends to tumble into them headfirst.
November 2008 -
John Sevigny: Just Passing Through
While in the U.S. the immigration issue has been buried under more "urgent" news, in Mexico U.S-bound Central American immigrants are facing a more dangerous trek than ever.
November 2008 -
Jake Whitney: Is The Awful Legacy of Lee Atwater Finally Dead?
While John McCain descended to some sickening lows in the 2008 presidential race, his dysfunctional campaign was merely the retarded grandchild—and if we're lucky, the last of the bloodline—of the godfather of Republican mudslinging, Lee Atwater.
November 2008 -
Tom Engelhardt: Don't Let Barack Obama Break Your Heart
If Obama accepts a War on Terror framework, as he already seems to have, he may soon find himself locked into all sorts of unpalatable situations, as once happened to another Democratic president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who opted to escalate an inherited war when what he most wanted to do was focus on domestic policy.
November 2008 -
Robert Reich: The Real Difference Between Bankruptcy and Bailout
The Treasury seems to have lost sight of its real client. It's client is not the creditors, shareholders, or executives of any of these firms. Its sole client is the American people.
November 2008 -
Katie Halper: Gulf War Syndrome 2.0 (For Veterans Day)
US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are being exposed to toxic chemicals that pose serious health risks.
November 2008 -
David Bollier: Designing the Obama Presidency
Will he build an open-source republic or a walled-garden of control?
November 2008 -
Robert Reich: The Mini Depression and the Maximum-Strength Remedy
Fiscal hawks and conservative supply siders notwithstanding, a major stimulus is in order. Government is the spender of last resort, and the nation is coming close to its last resort.
November 2008 -
Rebecca Solnit: The Jubilant Birth of the Obama Era
We must be realistic about an Obama presidency in order to avoid disappointment.
November 2008 -
Norman Solomon: A Mandate for Spreading the Wealth
Barack Obama won the presidency after clearly saying that he wants to spread the wealth. Let’s make him do it.
November 2008 -
Patricia Briggs: Documenting the Political Divide: The Photos of Ann Marsden
From her vantage point as a credentialed press photographer, Ann Marsden's camera cuts in close to the principle political players just as the familiar media images shown on television and printed in newspapers do; yet her photographs offer unfamiliar views of the candidates.
November 2008 -
Dustin L. Nelson: Translating the Polls into Electoral Votes
With only hours left until the 2008 presidential election what do all the polls mean in terms of electoral votes?
November 2008 -
David Doody: Stories of Change
While I hear many things that should assuage my fears about Tuesday, I am still nervous.
October 2008 -
Andrew J. Bacevich: Expanding War, Contracting Meaning
The next President and the Global War on Terror.
October 2008 -
Swetha Regunathan : City of Otherly Love
Reflections on canvassing in Northeast Philly.
October 2008 -
Norman Solomon: Needed for This Election: A Great Rejection
People’s votes are entirely their own, to do with as they see fit. But the right to do something is distinct from the wisdom of doing it.
October 2008 -
Norman Solomon: In the Battle for a Progressive Congress
Moving a progressive agenda on Capitol Hill will require more than defeating Republicans. It will require electing strong progressives.
October 2008 -
Tom Engelhardt: F is for Failure, The Bush Doctrine in Ruins
While we hear a lot about Bush's job-approval ratings and the media focus on Bush's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the record of his Global War on Terror has yet to be fully assessed.
October 2008 -
Election Integrity: A sampling of ongoing reports on widespread voter suppression
Volunteers at the Center for Media and Democracy’s Election Protection Wiki continue to collect reports of ongoing voter suppression. It's not pretty.
October 2008 -
Robert Reich: What Actually Needs to be Done About the Meltdown
Banks are hording money to improve true balance sheets because of the off-balance sheet vehicles created over the past several years. Until Wall Street actually lends directly to Main Street the problems will continue.
October 2008 -
David Doody: Michele Bachmann 'Represents' Minnesota on Hardball
Admitting that the United States is imperfect is not the same as being "Anti-American."
October 2008 -
Joel Whitney: Former Diebold Election Official Blows the Whistle
Chris Hood, formerly of Diebold Voting Systems (makers of electronic voting machines), describes in a video interview the many problems of modern voting
October 2008 -
Joel Whitney: Following a Lie
From the New York Sun to Jerome Corsi's Obama Nation, to the Washington Times, the lie about Obama that the right-wing media just won't put to rest.
October 2008 -
Robert Reich: Post-Meltdown Mythologies: Americans Have Been Living Beyond Their Means
The "living beyond our means" argument, with its thinly-veiled suggestion of moral terpitude, is technically correct, but it does not take into account that since 2000 median family income has been dropping.
October 2008 -
Tom Engelhardt: Living in the Ruins. My Depression -- or Ours?
When speaking of Depression these days most news stories are focused on the economy and not people.
October 2008 -
Norman Solomon: Requiem for the Bailout Storyline
The $700 billion bailout of Wall Street is another example of trickle-down policy and while some were calling for a trickle-up approach, the news media stampeded Congress into approving the bailout.
October 2008 -
Rick Ayers: Is There an American Eligible For the Nobel Prize?
The comments this week of Horace Engdahl suggesting that an American is unlikely to win the Nobel Prize in Literature have provoked great patriotic upswellings in the U.S., but there's something to what he said.
October 2008 -
Chalmers Johnson: Voting the Fate of the Nation
Will economic meltdown, race, or regional loyalty be the trump card in Election 2008?
October 2008 -
Norman Solomon: Projecting an Obama Victory
The McCain/Palin ticket will almost certainly benefit from the latest round of mud-slinging and racism, but they also stand to profit from overconfidence in voters in Obama's ability to win.
October 2008 -
Robert Reich: Early Boomers and the Economic Mess
The economic meltdown is hurting everyone. But if you’re an early baby boomer over the age of 55, you may be in particularly big trouble.
October 2008 -
Steve Fraser: The Specter of Wall Street
Wall Street's comeback as the place Americans love to hate.
October 2008 -
David Bollier: When Free Market Fantasies Collapse
The Wall Street meltdown requires us to recognize markets as social creations -- and to reinvent our politics accordingly.
October 2008 -
Robert Reich: The Stalled Deal
As partisan finger-pointing takes place over the Bailout of All Bailouts being voted down, Robert Reich offers his prediction for what bill will be enacted.
September 2008 -
David Doody: Obama and the Art of Argument
In conceding that John McCain was correct on some issues in the first presidential debate, Barack Obama showed he takes those issues seriously enough to see them from all sides.
September 2008 -
Luc Sante: Summer in the City
A story of death and infrastructure: When a car topples a building cops and neighbors alike do what they can to avoid thinking about what could be next.
September 2008 -
Jay Walljasper: It's Time to Reconsider Government Ownership of Companies
As we bail out Wall Street, America can learn an economic lesson from Germany’s most successful beer.
September 2008 -
Norman Solomon: Finally, the Story of the Whistleblower Who Tried to Prevent the Iraq War
To understand in personal, political and historic terms -- what Katharine Gun did, how the British and American governments responded, and what the U.S. news media did and did not report -- is to gain a clear-eyed picture of a military-industrial-media complex that plunged ahead with the invasion of Iraq shortly after her brave action of conscience.
September 2008 -
William J. Astore: Hey, Government! How About Calling on Us?
The New Deal's Civilian Conservation Corps, the CCC, called unemployed Americans to the civic colors in enormous numbers in truly tough times and helped do something we need again today: the rebuilding of crumbling American infrastructure.
September 2008 -
Robert Reich: Why Paulson and Bernanke are only Partly Correct, and Why Main Street Needs More Direct Help
Many of the average taxpayers being asked to take on Wall Street’s bad loans are the same people whose incomes are dropping. If Congress only pays attention to Wall Street, Wall Street's bad debts will continue to rise.
September 2008 -
Norman Solomon: Too Big to Fail and Too Small to Matter
The tale of two countries. Unfortunately they are both America.
September 2008 -
Parker Chehak: A Filibuster Proof Congress
Solely focusing on the presidential election can be dangerous. It was a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, after all, that allowed for The New Deal.
September 2008 -
Chip Ward: The Evolution of John McCain
Why John McCain picked Sarah Palin, Carbon Queen.
September 2008 -
Luc Sante: That's When Your Heartaches Begin
What if a record could change the world? Would anyone be willing to listen to it?
September 2008 -
Robert Reich: What Wall Street Should Be Required to Do, to Get A Blank Check From Taxpayers
The public is asking: Why should Wall Street get bailed out by me when I’m getting screwed?
September 2008 -
David Bollier: Publishers Take Aim at Open Access
Members of Congress join the publishing industry in trying to lock up taxpayer-funded medical research.
September 2008 -
Robert Reich: The Coming Bailout of All Bailouts Bill: A Better Alternative
Robert Reich continues the discussion of the bailouts of all bailouts, arguing that for any big financial institution that wants to clear its books the process should resemble chapter 11 under bankruptcy.
September 2008 -
Robert Reich: The Bailout of All Bailouts is a Bad Idea
Talk yesterday about the Bailouts of All Bailouts eased market fears and generated a giant rally on the Street, but how realistic is it?
September 2008 -
Steve Fraser: The End of a Gilded Age
Wall Street and Washington: How the rules of the game have changed.
September 2008 -
John Sevigny: Blood and Shame in Morelia, Michoacan
Eight people were killed and more than 100 injured Monday night when a pair of fragmentation grenades exploded during a crowded, Independence Day celebration in Morelia, capital of Michoacan state.
September 2008 -
David Bollier: Paying for Wall Street’s Speculative Greed
What 'We the People' really means: Having lost the political fights for strong banking regulation, we face a lose-lose scenario -- massive bailouts or economic collapse.
September 2008 -
Robert Reich: Why Wall Street is Melting Down, and What to Do About It
The fundamental problem on Wall Street isn't lack of capital. It's lack of trust. Bailouts and subsidies won't rebuild trust.
September 2008 -
Dustin L. Nelson: On David Foster Wallace (1962-2008)
Remembering David Foster Wallace.
September 2008 -
Bev Harris : Pick Quick, the Line's Growing
A new "time out" feature that kicks voters off of voting machines after 150 seconds of inactivity, record voter participation, and estimates of voter list density based on 2004 information rather than 2008, all add up to difficulty at the polls.
September 2008 -
Tom Engelhardt: Slaughter, Lies, and Video in Afghanistan
The Value of One, the Value of None: An anatomy of collateral damage in the Bush Era.
September 2008 -
Norman Solomon: Dubious Praise for ‘The Daily Show’
Absent from the fawning corporate media coverage of "The Daily Show" is evident self-awareness that the elaborate praise is a tacit form of convoluted self-loathing.
September 2008 -
David Bollier: Who Owns the Public View?
The billboard industry is pushing for new laws to prevent trees on public land from blocking billboards.
September 2008 -
David Doody: A Missed Opportunity
Rappers at the Take Back Labor Day Concert didn't do enough to speak to the young people in the crowd.
September 2008 -
Michael Schwartz: Who Lost Iraq?
Is the Maliki Government jumping off the American Ship of State?
September 2008 -
Robert Reich: Fannie and Freddie, as Predicted
Because of the implicit government guarantee, Fannie and Freddie could take on even more risks and make even more money. Until now.
September 2008 -
David Doody: Some Things I Learned From the Speeches
The politicizing of issues that, apparently, should be too human for politics.
September 2008 -
Frederick S. Lane: A Decent Decision, But Fleeting?
The current Supreme Court may not quite be the Court that the Religious Right would like deciding a case having to do with decency issues, but it may be close enough.
September 2008 -
Norman Solomon: Beyond the Conventions
The differences between Democrats and Republicans are even greater than the convention speeches are apt to indicate, and the effect of another Republican president cannot be downplayed.
September 2008 -
Coldsnap Legal Collective: MEDIA RELEASE
Over 300 protesters, bystanders, media, and medics arrested at RNC. Two minors convicted of contempt, sentenced to 30 days in adult jail.
September 2008 -
Michael T. Klare: Putin's Ruthless Gambit
The Bush Administration falters in a geopolitical chess match.
September 2008 -
Robert Reich: McCain, Palin, and the Important Difference Between Boldness and Riskiness
As Barack Obama lays out a bold plan for reforming the economy and redirecting foreign policy, John McCain offers plans and decisions that are anything but bold.
August 2008 -
Dustin L. Nelson: I am Robin Gunningham
What is the benefit of unmasking a great artist?
August 2008 -
Edith Mirante: The Ruby Ape: A Deadly Storm and a Lethal Regime. Part 2
The lack of relief to Burma and the rescue fantasy the Burmese people have endured for years.
August 2008 -
Edith Mirante: The Ruby Ape: A Deadly Storm and a Lethal Regime. Part 1
Revisiting Nargis: How Burma's regime and its connections to the rest of the world compound the country's problems.
August 2008 -
David Bollier: Who Owns “The Last Best Place”?
Montana beats back the privatization of a beloved phrase.
August 2008 -
Chalmers Johnson: The Past Destroyed: Five Years Later
A new introduction to Chalmers Johnson's 2005 piece on the destruction of Iraq's heritage, 'Smash of Civilizations.'
August 2008 -
An Ode to Labor Day
Robert Reich reminisces on his first "job" and the meaning of Labor Day.
August 2008 -
Crossing Borders, Expanding Equality, and Seeking Justice
As same-sex couples and their wedding parties cross borders and affirm marriages, Massachusetts and California will be exporting equality.
August 2008 -
John McCain's Disingenuous Years
Some people still believe things about John McCain that stopped being true years ago. (My follow-up to Robert Reich's blog post yesterday on Guernica.)
August 2008 -
McCain, Obama, and the Inherent Advantage of Caring More About Ends Than Means
Those who are willing to do anything to achieve their ends will always have a tactical advantage over those who regard the means as ends in themselves.
August 2008 -
Progressives and Obama: The Clash of Narratives
Being a critical supporter of a candidate is neither a betrayal of the candidate nor a betrayal of principles.
August 2008 -
Is Fair Use Regaining Its Mojo?
“Girl Talk” courageously samples music without asking permission.
August 2008 -
Is Perpetual War Our Future?: Learning the Wrong Lessons from the Bush Era
Part two of Andrew Bacevich's series on "the American military crisis."
August 2008 -
Rebecca Morgan Frank in Best New Poets 2008
Guernica prides itself on a unique embrace of art and politics. I would be lying if I said finding that balance in poetry is easy.
August 2008 -
The New York Sun's Obama Frame-Up
Two months ago, I wrote about The New York Sun's inaccurate attempt to draw ties between Senator Barack Obama and Islamic extremism in Kenya. The chief problem with The Sun's reporting was that while the ties may have been there, the Islamic extremism was definitely not.
August 2008 -
The Fed and Authoritarian Capitalism
The Fed acting without congressional authority isn’t Chinese-type authoritarian capitalism, of course, but nor is it, strictly speaking, what we’ve come to expect from a democracy.
August 2008 -
Illusions of Victory: How the United States Did Not Reinvent War… But Thought It Did
Between what President Bush called upon America's soldiers to do and what they were capable of doing loomed a huge gap that defines the military crisis besetting the United States today.
August 2008 -
Would Thomas Jefferson Refuse to Recycle?
It’s time to recover the meaning of the word “independence.”
August 2008 -
Shroud
Luc Sante offers a story of a man's attempt to meander through the Midwest, leading to an unexpected place and time.
August 2008 -
Redefining the Pill: Bush Administration Calls Contraception 'Abortion'
An administration that has done everything in its power to oppose abortion goes after the main thing that can prevent unwanted pregnancies and proposes policy that virtually assures there will be more abortions.
August 2008 -
Steinbeck, Hemon and Our Progressive Zeitgeist
Jennifer Nix tells us how literature changes the world.
August 2008 -
Never Again, Again
The Olympics are nearly upon us, and China continues to ignore the people of Darfur. Perhaps they can offer assistance if and when the genocide ends.
August 2008 -
Follow This Dime: Why Misgovernment Was No Accident in George W. Bush's Washington
A how-to history of the conservative era -- specifically how to destroy a government, leave Americans in the lurch, and enrich yourselves all at the same time.
August 2008 -
Democratic Platform Option: 'Guaranteed Health Care for All'
H.R. 676 -- the single-payer bill introduced by Rep. John Conyers that now has 90 co-sponsors in the House -- would guarantee publicly funded, privately delivered health care for everyone in the United States.
July 2008 -
Aspartame: One teabag, one spoonful of neurotoxins and a splash of milk
Is the illusion of sugar, coupled with the perception of being able to "have your cake and eat it, too," actually worth what else can come with that illusion?
July 2008 -
The Military-Industrial Complex: It's Much Later Than You Think
The privatization of the military and intelligence communities has, to great consequence, become more and more common since the Reagan administration.
July 2008 -
The Heart of the Economic Mess
The only lasting remedy for the current economic downturn is to improve Americans' standard of living by widening the circle of prosperity.
July 2008 -
What's Wrong with Gay (or Straight) Parents Raising Gay Kids?
If legitimate research found that 100 percent of children raised by same-sex couples developed same-sex attractions, it just wouldn't matter
July 2008 -
John McCain Gets It Wrong...Again
After a couple of geographic mix-ups John McCain recently misspoke on the subject about which he claims to be an expert.
July 2008 -
A Short Primer on McCainomics Versus Obamanomics: Top-Down or Bottom-Up
In a global economy the propositions of top-down economics are highly questionable. The tenets of bottom-up economics will result in greater prosperity in America.
July 2008 -
Having the 'Best Military' Is Not Always a Good Thing: Reclaiming Our Citizen-Soldier Heritage
As we seal ourselves away from war's horrors, we're correspondingly finding it easier to speak of "warfighters" and to boast of having the world's best military.
July 2008 -
Enclosing the Offshore Commons
Once again, Bush is using fear and deception to dismiss facts and steamroll the opposition.
July 2008 -
The Perils of Parables
With the Obama campaign trying to make inroads in the evangelical community it is easy to see the perils of mixing politics and religion and why we should be moving away from identity politics as the guiding principle of our campaigns.
July 2008 -
Guernica and Guantanamo in New York City, Mia Farrow in Darfur, and New Poetry and Fiction
If you find yourself in NYC this week, Guernica, Public Affairs, and Amnesty International invite you to join us this Friday, July 18, at 6 PM, at the Old Town Bar (45 E. 18th Street) for a celebration of Mahvish Khan's My Guantanamo Diaries.
July 2008 -
The End of the Great Moderation, the Bailouts of Freddie & Fannie and Wall Street, and the Tattered Safety Net for Everyone Else
The "Great Moderation" led the nation to think we didn't need much by way of social insurance. We are now seeing why we need those safety nets.
July 2008 -
The Mohammad Cartoons Then and Now: Defending Satire
Even if we were offended by the New Yorker cover, we all must speak up for the right to offend. Discussions of "taste" or "respect" are insidious code words for censorship.
July 2008 -
Fannie, Freddie, and the Pending Taxpayer Bailout
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are too big to fail, which means Bear Stearns squared. The taxpayers will get stuck with the tab again.
July 2008 -
Obama and the Progressive Base
The best way to avoid becoming disillusioned is to not have illusions in the first place.
July 2008 -
Colombia Hostage Rescue Cause for Joy and Sadness
The liberation of the hostages has conveniently shifted media focus away from yet another political scandal in which the administration of Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe finds itself mired.
July 2008 -
The Iraqi Oil Ministry's New Fave Five
All the Oil News That's Fit to Print (Attn: The New York Times).
July 2008 -
McCain's Budget Whopper
How exactly does John McCain propose to balance the budget by the end of his first term? By telling Americans that supply-side economics works even though they know it doesn't.
July 2008 -
Notorious Alabama Politician Keynotes White Supremacist Conference
Since 1998 26 public officials, nearly all republicans, have spoken to the Council of Conservative Citizens, a group denounced by then-head of the GOP, Jim Nicholson, because of its racist views.
July 2008 -
Brazil: The Progress Myth
The great and mighty Amazon is slowly being brought to its knees in the name of progress.
July 2008 -
The Wage Gap is being Fueled by the Gas Gap
How the price of gas fuels the widening of the wage gap in America.
July 2008 -
The Good News in Iraq (Don't Count on It)
Given the situation of Iraq more than five years after the invasion, to speak of the urge to surge and its results as "success" or as "good news" is essentially obscene.
June 2008 -
Unleash Fiscal Policy Now, or More Severe Recession Ahead
Now that it is clear that the Fed can't and won't stimulate the economy, fiscal policy is the sole remaining vehicle.
June 2008 -
Tapping into the Power to Share
Health Commons aspires to build a new ecosystem for research.
June 2008 -
Living on the Ice Shelf: Humanity's Meltdown
Welcome to the Anthropocene, an Earth epoch defined by the emergence of urban-industrial society as a geological force -- and get used to it.
June 2008 -
What Were They Thinking? United States v. Williams and Free Speech
The latest decision in a disturbing line of Congressional actions and Supreme Court decisions that cloak encroachments on the First Amendment in the pious garb of protecting children.
June 2008 -
Generic Drugs, an Endangered Commons*
Big drug companies are using their clout to stifle and delay generic competition. We pay billions of dollars more.
June 2008 -
'No' to Further Offshore Drilling
Why making more federal land and offshore rights available for drilling makes no sense.
June 2008 -
Health Care and Ghosts of War
The insurance and hospital industries at the center of health care in the United States are profiting from priorities that condemn many people to death, while corporate enterprises continue to make a killing from U.S. military expenditures.
June 2008 -
The Greatest Story Never Told: Finally, the U.S. Mega-Bases in Iraq Make the News
The U.S. Mega-Bases in Iraq are basically modern American ziggurats. They are the cherished monuments of the Bush administration, meant to long outlast it. They are also crucial facts on the ground, when it comes to George W. Bush's Iraq policy, and yet they have been largely missing from the American landscape.
June 2008 -
Strange Bedfellows: Lesbian Moms and Anti-Gay Legal Groups
The reasons behind a right-wing, anti-gay legal group helping out a lesbian mother.
June 2008 -
Beware People's Intentions
What are the real motives behind big companies' philanthropic campaigns?
June 2008 -
Deadly 'Diplomacy'
As George W. Bush lays more flagstones along the path to war on Iran, mainline U.S. news media is, as it was leading up to the war on Iraq, incomplete.
June 2008 -
'E' for Expeditionary: One Man's Online Journey through Bush's Alphabet Soup
A frequent contributor to Guernica, Tom Engelhardt, offers his description of his own online "expeditionary" journey through George W. Bush's world -- a little up-to-the-minute alternative history of these mad years when Bush the Younger ruled.
June 2008 -
Losing Latin America: What Will the Obama Doctrine Be Like?
In another moment of crisis and ebbing power what will a U.S. administration work out next in a Latin America that has pulled away from its domination?
June 2008 -
Turf
Guestblogger Luc Sante on the time when graffiti truly became an artform in New York.
June 2008 -
A Personal Reflection on Why Obama Should Not Choose HRC as his VP
Robert Reich on the Vice President question.
June 2008 -
Obama, Clinton and Anger to Burn
Now that the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination is over what will be the result of the anger that contest produced?
June 2008 -
The Court and the Cross: The Religious Right's Crusade to Reshape the Supreme Court
An excerpt from The Court and the Cross: The Religious Right's Crusade to Reshape the Supreme Court, wherein the ultimate goal of the Christian Right is starkly revealed: the forcible baptism of the United States as a "Christian Nation."
June 2008 -
McCain (Mis)Speaks
How the Senator Won the War of Words in Iraq (again and again and again…)
May 2008 -
Why McCain's 'Cap-and-Trade' Won't Work Nearly as Well as Obama's
The important part of a cap-and-trade system is how the permits are allocated.
May 2008 -
Wikileakes Release: John McCain US Presidential Election Clinton Astroturfing Strategy
McCain team claims Clinton strategy memo a frame-up.
May 2008 -
River of Resistance: How the American Imperial Dream Foundered in Iraq
After years of Iraqis paying a terrible price it is past time for the rest of the world to shoulder at least a small share of the burden of resistance.
May 2008 -
Economic Inequality is Squeezing the Middle Class
The decline of the professional middle class is due to something far more pervasive than just individuals harboring too high expectations and poor money management skills.
May 2008 -
The Real Source of Gladiator Politics
Will the level of presidential campaign discourse actually be raised this time around? Do the American people even want it to be?
May 2008 -
Kiss American Security Goodbye: 15 Numbers That Add Up to an Age of Insecurity
Since the events of September 11, 2001 the course of action of the Bush administration, as well as its inability to foresee and deal with crises facing this country, have led to a situation far from secure.
May 2008 -
The Petrification of John McCain
How a once flexible and even maverick politician lost all resistance to the threats of evangelical indifference in November.
May 2008 -
A Housing Bill That's Better Than Nothing
The housing bill currently in Congress would lead to, at best, a fraction of the refinancings needed, which is better than nothing. But President Bush may not even want to go that far.
May 2008 -
Civilizing Brazil's Native Indians
In Brazil, in the name of civilization, indigenous people are mistreated and displaced from land that the law says is not theirs.
May 2008 -
The World at 350: A Last Chance for Civilization
The importance of the number 350 in a post-Kyoto world.
May 2008 -
Obama’s Clarifying Win: The Fly on the Wall Is the Wall
Norman Solomon on Tuesday's results.
May 2008 -
The Last War and the Next One: Descending into Madness in Iraq -- and Beyond
The last war won't end, but in the Pentagon they're already arguing about the next one.
May 2008 -
Mia Farrow and Bernard-Henri Levy issue joint demands on their governments at a Guernica lunch
Over fillet of sole at the Carlyle Hotel, Guernica's Crisis Darfur participants decide to make demands on Presidents Bush and Sarkozy to facilitate the protection force that Sudan's government has avoided facing
May 2008 -
Happy Birthday, Justice Stevens
Do the Democratic presidential candidates put enough emphasis on the make-up of the Supreme Court?
May 2008 -
What to Do About the Oil Crisis
The answer to the oil crisis is not in the Alaskan tundra or a tax holiday on gas. The answer is in a strong dollar and alternative sources of energy.
April 2008 -
Guernica to host two events at PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature
Events to focus on the crisis in Darfur, with Mia Farrow and Bernard-Henri Levy (Tuesday, April 29), and writing across borders (Friday, May 2).
April 2008 -
Selling the President's General: The Petraeus Story
As the Bush Administration waged a war of propaganda on the U.S. media and U.S. citizens, General David Petraeus became the "face" of the administration, with adoring media members fawning over him during his ascension.
April 2008 -
Party Like It’s 1932: The Obama Option
The similarities between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Barack Obama: History could repeat itself.
April 2008 -
