-
Video: Free Word hosts the launch of Writers Bloc
February 2012
Kamila Shamsie and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, among others, discuss education around the world at the launch of pioneering writing and education project Writers Bloc. -
Conversations With History: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State
February 2012
Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian Garry Wills discusses his latest book, compares Obama to past presidents, and analyzes the impact of the atomic bomb on the U.S. constitutional system. -
David Chura: Keeping Lock-up Kids and their Families Connected
February 2012
As anyone who has worked with kids in the penal system knows on a gut level, it is crucial to have supportive community members involved in young offenders’ lives as they serve their time. But why is it so difficult? -
Robert Lipsyte: Four Reasons to Watch on Super Sunday
February 2012
It’s an election season. Although you may be planning otherwise, you need to watch this game to fully understand how jobs, religion, leadership, and healthcare dominate every American contest. -
“The Intrigue”
February 2012
In this excerpt from I Dare to Say, a collection of the real-life stories of African women edited by Hilda Twongyeirwe, Yemo talks about female circumcision. -
John Sevigny: Central America to Rome and Back Again
January 2012
America. Europe. Freedom. Liberation. From Mexico to the streets of El Salvador, these words make mouths water. But the reality is often more complicated than it seems. -
TaxCast: A Difference of Opinions
January 2012
The inaugural episode of the Tax Justice Network’s new monthly podcast. -
Live Webcast: The Security Council Debates Syria
January 2012In light of a ten-month siege against protestors, the UN Security Council debates a resolution calling for Syria's leader to step down. -
Tom Engelhardt: Iran Through the Looking Glass
January 2012
Iranian aircraft carriers in the Gulf of Mexico, and why it can’t happen here. -
Michael T. Klare: Hormuz-Mania
January 2012
Why closure of the Strait of Hormuz could ignite a war and a global depression. -
Russ Baker: Ten Questions on Romney’s Taxes
January 2012
So, Romney’s taxes have been disclosed. But what does it all mean? -
January 27, 2012—Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens for Legitimate Government
January 2012
Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group. -
Zoya Phan: Burma Needs Real Peace, Not Just A Pause in Conflict
January 2012
What’s the benchmark for real change in Burma? -
VIDEO: Inshallah, Kashmir: Living Terror
January 2012
Without India’s Censor Board approval, Oscar-nominated director Ashvin Kumar releases new documentary on Kashmiris’ plight online. -
Joel Whitney: Celebrating One Year Since Egypt’s Uprising
January 2012
This week marks the one-year anniversary of Egypt’s landmark protests. A new film collective reminds us of the courage that spawned it, and the work yet to do. -
Christian Parenti: Why Climate Change Will Make You Love Big Government
January 2012
A secret history of free enterprise and the government that made it possible. -
Joanna Eede: The Fate of the Jarawa
January 2012
Two years after Andaman tribe dies, another “faces extinction.” -
Torie Rose DeGhett: Troubadours of the Revolution
January 2012
The repertoire of musical dissidence performed by hip hop artists and rappers has been a key force in the Arab Spring. -
Robert Reich: Who is Sheldon Adelson and What Has Newt Promised Him?
January 2012
Do you know who Sheldon and Marian Adelson are? Do you know what Newt Gingrich has promised them, or what they think they’ll get out of a Grinch presidency? -
William Astore: Confessions of a Recovering Weapons Addict
January 2012
Today we’re playing a new tune: what’s good for Lockheed Martin or Boeing or [insert major-defense-contractor-of-your-choice here] is good for America. -
Søren Schmidt: The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in Syria
January 2012
Otto von Bismarck is said to have remarked that the wise statesman listens to the footsteps of history. It seems that Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, has a different theory. -
Russ Baker: The Deaths of JFK, RFK—and the Silence of the Lambs
January 2012Plenty of new “JFK assassination” material coming down the pike for you avid consumers. Too bad it’s mostly garbage. When exactly did courage and truth-seeking go out of fashion? -
Robert Reich: The State of Our Disunion
January 2012
Why the government allows itself to be overwhelmed by corporate money. -
Hari Kunzru: Reading The Satanic Verses in Jaipur
January 2012
Why the novelist read from Salman Rushdie’s banned book The Satanic Verses to mark his protest against the cancellation of Rushdie’s visit to the Jaipur Literature Festival. -
January 20, 2012—Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens for Legitimate Government
January 2012Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group. -
Joanna Eede: Reported Killing of Uncontacted Awá Tribe Child
January 2012“Evidence of attack” discovered where Indian child was reportedly “burned alive.” -
Karen Charman: Fukushima: Why We Should (Still) Be Worried
January 2012
If you thought you didn’t need to pay attention any more to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, well, you’d be wrong. The Japanese government isn’t necessarily taking the right steps. -
Chase Madar: Blood on Whose Hands?
January 2012
Bradley Manning, Washington, and accusing WikiLeaks of murder. -
Robert Reich: The Romney Tax Loophole
January 2012Don’t call it the Romney tax, as Newt wants to do. Call it the Romney tax loophole. And let him explain why he thinks it’s justified. -
Roslyn Bernstein: In the Land of Double Letters: Artists’ Housing and Studios in Scandinavia
January 2012
Whatever their living and studio situation, the goal of most artists is to have their work shown. -
Conversations With History: Israel’s Bargain with the Bomb
January 2012Author Avner Cohen discusses his latest book, explicates Israel’s nuclear doctrine of amimut, and analyzes the threat posed to Israel if Iran succeeds in acquiring nuclear weapons. -
David Morris: How Obama Can Guarantee a Second Term
January 2012
Stand in the doorway of a post office scheduled for closing and declare “Not on my watch.” -
Robert Reich: Free Enterprise on Trial
January 2012
The higher you go in the economy, the easier it is to make money without taking any personal financial risk at all. -
Writers Bloc Event
January 2012Event at the Free Word Lecture Theatre featured Kamila Shamsie, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and our own Michael Archer. -
Carmen García Durazo: The Counterpoint of Change
January 2012
The Writers Bloc essays don’t have to have a direct affect on policy or pedagogy to be meaningful. -
Tahmima Anam: Bangladesh
January 2012
In this piece from our Writers Bloc project, our collection of essays about education systems around the world, Tahmima Anam explores madrasas in Bangladesh. -
Zukiswa Wanner: South Africa
January 2012
In this piece from our Writers Bloc project, our collection of essays about education systems around the world, Zukiswa Wanner explores the politics of South African education. -
Petina Gappah: Zimbabwe
January 2012
In this piece from our Writers Bloc project, our collection of essays about education systems around the world, Petina Gappah revisits her childhood schools in Zimbabwe. -
Hardeep Singh Kohli: India
January 2012
In this piece from our Writers Bloc project, our collection of essays about education systems around the world, Hardeep Singh Kohli travels back to his hometown in the Punjab. -
Nick Laird: Nepal
January 2012
In this piece from our Writers Bloc project, our collection of essays about education systems around the world, Nick Laird explores education in Maoist-controlled Nepal. -
Rachel Holmes: Palestine
January 2012
In this piece from our Writers Bloc project, our collection of essays about education systems around the world, Rachel Holmes inflames imaginations with the Palestine Writing Workshop. -
Nick Turse: The Crash and Burn Future of Robot Warfare
January 2012
What 70 downed drones tell us about the new American way of war. -
January 13, 2012—Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens for Legitimate Government
January 2012Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group. -
Fred Pearce: Can “Climate-Smart” Agriculture Help Both Africa and the Planet?
January 2012
What carbon-conscious, “climate-smart” agriculture could mean for some of the world’s poorest farmers. -
Nathalie Handal: Haiti
January 2012
In the first piece in our Writers Bloc project, our collection of essays about education systems around the world, writer Nathalie Handal visits Haiti a year after its devastating earthquake. -
Joshua Dratel: A Loaded Gun
January 2012
Why the NDAA will substantially reduce, if not eliminate altogether, international cooperation with respect to counter-terrorism. -
Justin Alvarez: Haiti: Tents Beyond Tents
January 2012
On the second anniversary of the Haiti earthquake, a comics journalism project highlights the devastated country that is still recovering. -
Anthony Cuthbertson: Syria’s Torture Machine
January 2012
British documentary offers cause for concern in more ways than one. -
Carmen García Durazo: Posthuman at Last: Chaos and Cunning in Jay Scheib’s World of Wires
January 2012
Are you living in a computer simulation? Jay Scheib’s recent work, World of Wires, may have the answer. -
Christina Chauvenet: The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon’s Last Uncontacted Tribes
January 2012
Scott Wallace’s new book, The Unconquered, provides insight into the unknown world of isolated tribes in the Amazon. -
Tom Engelhardt: Superpower Adrift in an Alien World
January 2012It’s time for us to realize that none of the crucial problems on this planet are amenable to military solutions, not even by a country willing to pour its treasure into previously unheard of national security expenditures. -
Mallika Kaur: Women and Exclusionary Development
January 2012
Recent protests by Punjabi farmers against the Gobindpura land acquisition and spirited participation by women in these protests illustrate that “women’s issues” are not limited to practices that only impact them. -
Chris Lombardi: No Art by Committee
January 2012
The power of Jane Hammond’s Fallen lies in its simplicity. Let’s not clutter it. -
John Sevigny: The Center of Our Loss
January 2012
What Hammond’s Fallen says about American soldier-centered mourning. -
Philip Warburg: Wind Power: America’s New Harvest
January 2012
Unlike the battering that U.S. solar equipment producers have suffered at the hands of Chinese and other Asian competitors, America is well on its way to building a robust domestic manufacturing platform for wind. -
Russ Baker: An Open Letter to NYT Staffers: Leave the Plantation and Join Us
January 2012A response to the recent wave of NYT insurrection. -
Juan Cole: Ahmadinejad in Latin America
January 2012
A combination of anti-imperialism, a desire for independence from the U.S., and Iran’s oil wealth is giving Tehran a continued opening in Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela and Ecuador. -
Mark Dowie: What’s A Park For?
January 2012
The battle over whether or not to allow the cultivation of oysters inside a California national park. -
Lex Paulson: Applied Classics: How Pythagoras Explains Ron Paul
January 2012
When a movement is more important than a win. -
Joanna Eede: “Human Safaris” Exposed in the Andaman Islands
January 2012The Observer fights back against exploitation of India’s island Jarawa tribe. -
Michael T. Klare: Danger Waters
January 2012
When the U.S. faces a problem in the world—say, keeping the energy flowing on this planet—the first thing that’s done is to militarize the problem. It’s the only way Washington now knows how to think. -
Robert Reich: How a Little Bit of Good Economic News Can Be Bad for the President
January 2012Don’t expect the unemployment rate to stay down -
Lorraine Adams: Obligation or Wisdom?
January 2012
The Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist weighs in on our debate over criticism and Jane Hammond’s Fallen. -
Legacy Russell: This Is Just to Say: Challenging Jane Hammond’s Fallen
January 2012
Accepting artwork is not the job of the critic, just like accepting the world around one is not the job of the artist. -
Robin Yassin-Kassab: Out of It
January 2012
A heart-lurching debut novel from an up-and-coming British Palestinian writer. -
Anthony Kammer: America’s Libertarian Pendulum
January 2012
The return of libertarianism shouldn’t shock you. -
Juan Cole: Turkey Warns Against Sunni-Shiite Civil War
January 2012Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu’s general emphasis on tamping down tensions couldn’t be more essential. -
January 8, 2012—Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens for Legitimate Government
January 2012Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group. -
Spencer Mandel: The Cradle of Conflagration: The End (and Beginning) of the War for Iraq
January 2012
Have all our expenditures in blood and money bought a more stable society in Iraq? -
Katie Ryder: “And will you be taking the ACD?”
January 2012
A writer reflects on her arrest at Occupy Wall Street’s protest near Times Square on October 15th. -
Rebecca Bates: I Ran Away From Home and All I Got Was This Lousy Deportation
January 2012
A Dallas teen missing since 2010 turns up in Colombia, where she was deported after a mistaken identity. -
Bill McKibben: Armed With Naïvete
January 2012
Why it’s time to stop being cynical and start getting angry. -
Jillian Steinhauer: In Defense of Jane Hammond’s Fallen
January 2012
A good critic doesn’t tell the artist what they ought to have done. -
Jay Walljasper: 12 Reasons You’ll Be Hearing More About the Commons in 2012
January 2012
We Power stands at the convergence of economic and cultural trends. -
Robert Reich: The Decline of the Public Good
January 2012Even Margaret Thatcher would be appalled by the privatization of American society. -
Jonathan M. Ladd: Why Is Everyone Mad at the Mainstream Media?
January 2012
When and why did Americans stop trusting the media? Jonathan M. Ladd offers some ideas in his new book. -
Juan Cole: Will His New Sanctions on Iran Cost Obama the Presidency?
January 2012The Obama administration is imposing new penalties against Iran, but is the U.S. playing with fire? -
Tom Engelhardt: Lessons from Lost Wars in 2012
January 2012Over the last decade, the U.S. has been taught a repetitive lesson when it comes to ground wars on the Eurasian mainland: don’t launch them. -
Russ Baker: Iowa: Watch!… Watch!… Watch!… Why are you Watching?
January 2012Deconstructing conventional media and the 2012 horserace. -
December 30, 2011—Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens for Legitimate Government
December 2011Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group. -
Joy Wood: Best Unfinished Novel of 2011: The Pale King
December 2011
There are only two certain things in life: death and taxes. David Foster Wallace’s final book deals with both. -
Before It’s Next Year…
December 2011Hangovers aside, 2011 was another banner year for us. Let’s make 2012 better. -
Conversations With History: U.S.-Iranian Relations in the 1970s
December 2011How the Shah’s dependence on the rise of oil prices and his need to fund his new military role ultimately led to his downfall and the implosion of Iran. -
Jillian Steinhauer: Best Political Art of 2011
December 2011
The American soldiers honored in artist Jane Hammond’s Fallen installation are remembered as individuals instead of as a statistic. -
Aseem Chhabra: The 10 Best Films of 2011
December 2011
2011 was filled with 3-D, childhood favorites, franchises reboots, and existential indies, but what stood out most were the human dramas. -
Christine Larusso: Best 2011 Microessay on Poetry
December 2011
Poet Rachel Zucker asks us to demand sentimentality. Because we’re human, dammit. -
Robin Yassin-Kassab: Now the Bombs
December 2011Who’s to blame for the car bombs in Damascus? Answering this question might be the least of our worries. -
Russ Baker: Justifying War With Iran
December 2011Is the U.S. preparing the public for war with Iran? You bet. -
December 23, 2011—Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens for Legitimate Government
December 2011Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group. -
Julia Grønnevet: Anders Breivik: Madman or Fighter for an Idea?
December 2011
Guernica brings you an extensive translation of Brevik’s psychological evaluation. -
Dario Robleto: Best 2011 Art Show NYers Won’t See
December 2011
The Texas-based artist’s solo exhibition at the Des Moines Art Center confronts human-induced extinction. -
Joanna Eede: Christmas Reindeer Mystery As World’s Largest Herd Plummets
December 2011
Reindeer aren’t just for Christmas. They are central to the lives and cultures of indigenous peoples across the sub-Arctic. -
Susie Linfield: The Best and the Worst Events of 2011
December 2011
As 2011 draws to a close, the world is faced with a host of uncertainties of what will come next. -
Nick Turse: The Drone That Fell From the Sky
December 2011What a busted robot airplane tells us about the American Empire in 2012 and beyond. -
Belén Fernández: The Latest Installment of the Iranian Terror Plot
December 2011
Why is the Daily Beast buying into a right-wing plot to place Iranian “terrorists” in Latin America? -
Robert Reich: The Defining Issue
December 2011Mo’ money, mo’ problems. Why “big government” isn’t the problem. -
Sam Kerbel: Best Battle Royale of 2011: Chomsky vs. Hitchens
December 2011
Guernica recalls the ferocious (and prose-laden, foreign policy-focused, and politically savvy) battle of heavyweights. -
Tom Engelhardt: The Four Occupations of Planet Earth
December 2011How the Occupied became the Occupiers. -
Bill McKibben: At Last, A New Story for the Future
December 2011
Why we must control our appetite for natural resources. -
Eboo Patel: Becoming All-American Muslims
December 2011
If the #loweshatesmuslims campaign illustrates anything, it's that Muslims will never be Ground Zero Mosque-d again. -
Guernica on Longform’s Best of the Year List
December 2011Meghan O’Gieblyn’s “Sniffing Glue,” chosen as one of the top 10 essays of the year. -
Genevieve Walker: Maurizio Cattelan’s Drying Laundry
December 2011
It’s easy to hate on Maurizio Cattelan’s 21-year retrospective at New York City’s Guggenheim, but its perpetual pantsing and mooning grow on you. -
Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich: The Fall of the “Liberal Elite”
December 2011
The making of the American 99% and the collapse of the middle class. -
Conversations With History: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful
December 2011
Glenn Greenwald analyzes the relationship between principle, power, and law, and describes the erosion of justice in the United States. -
Nick Turse: Did the Pentagon Help Strangle the Arab Spring?
December 2011Uncovering the military’s secret military. -
Jonathan Z. Larsen: The Dominique Strauss-Kahn Case Revisited
December 2011
Was Dominique Strauss-Kahn set up? Or more importantly, why would someone make the effort to? -
Justin Alvarez: My Favorite Commercial of 2011
December 2011It’s a good thing when advertising makes you feel a little bit stupid. -
Justin Alvarez: Yasujiro Ozu, Life’s Poet
December 2011A commemoration of Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu on the anniversary of his birth and death. -
Robert Reich: The Remarkable Political Stupidity of the Street
December 2011It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt. How Wall Street is its own worst enemy. -
Tom Engelhardt: The 1% Election: Their Bread, Our Circus
December 2011How to turn election year into election life. -
December 11, 2011—Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens for Legitimate Government
December 2011Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group. -
Jenny Odell: All the People on Google Earth
December 2011
The graphic artist on visiting the Google headquarters, the limits of photographic “reality,” and the rapidly changing face of contemporary photography. -
Russ Baker: The Saudi Arab Spring Nobody Noticed
December 2011Why Saudi Arabia can’t count on the handy boost the West gave to revolutions in nearby countries. -
Lex Paulson: Applied Classics: A Letter from the 99% of Ancient Rome
December 2011What the Occupy movement can learn from Ancient Rome. -
Guernica’s Interviewees Featured on Foreign Policy’s Top 100
December 2011Our top 9 of FP’s movers and shakers of 2011 (including one dude who’s kind of meh) -
Video: President Obama’s Osawatomie Speech
December 2011Video footage of what Robert Reich calls Obama’s most important speech on the economy -
Clark Row: The Lucky One
December 2011
On the 70th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, the author recalls his experience as a child watching the attack from his home in Honolulu. -
Carmen García Durazo: Beats, Rhymes, and Shabazz
December 2011
A Seattle duo’s enigmatic contribution to 2011’s hip hop sound. -
Robert Reich: The Most Important Economic Speech of His Presidency
December 2011Barack Obama channels Theodore Roosevelt as he addresses America’s “gaping inequality” as the “defining issue of our time” and lays out the possible layout for his 2012 reelection platform. -
Michael T. Klare: A New Cold War in Asia?
December 2011
How President Obama is playing with fire by threatening China. -
Travis Holloway: Performing Art or Democracy? On Poetry at Occupy Wall Street
December 2011
Could it be that the generation seemingly structured by a new politics is also structured by a new kind of art? -
Robert Reich: The Jobs Report: Don’t Break Out the Champagne
December 2011Why it’s too early to celebrate November’s job growth. -
Genevieve Walker: Best Art of 2011
December 2011
The best art wasn’t found in galleries this year. It was found online. -
William deBuys: The Parching of the West
December 2011
The greatest water crisis in the history of civilization. The grimmest show on Earth. -
December 2, 2011—Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens for Legitimate Government
December 2011Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group. -
Kaye Cain-Nielsen: Best Manifesto on Stealing Other Writers’ Work
December 2011
This year, ask yourself: why create when you can steal? -
Jamal Mahjoub: Free Alaa
December 2011
How to save one of Egypt’s most prominent anti-regime voices. -
Tom Engelhardt: Into the Whirlwind
December 2011After almost nine years of war and occupation, what does Washington have to show for itself? -
Sam Kerbel: Top 3 Book Review Take-Downs
December 2011
A sample of this year’s most linguistically creative and intellectually exasperating spankings. -
U Win Htein: The Return of Burma’s National League for Democracy
November 2011
Aung San Suu Kyi’s senior staffer U Win Htein on how and why the Burmese government is now reforming, the grounds for that change, and the National League for Democracy’s role in the transformation. -
Justin Alvarez: The Day After
November 2011How Congolese rapper Baloji reminds his native country that what’s most important in times of struggle is sticking together. -
Conversations With History: U.S. Foreign Policy in a World Undergoing Change
November 2011In a video conversation with Harry Kreisler, the journalist Tom Wicker, former columnist for The New York Times, discusses the Presidency and the media at the height of the Cold War. -
Robin Yassin-Kassab: The Aftermath
November 2011Nir Rosen records the hardening of sectarian boundaries, the firming up of assabiya, or group identity, in the Middle East. -
Justin Alvarez: The 5 Best Films By Georges Méliès
November 2011Martin Scorsese’s recent film, Hugo, revives interest in the silent film pioneer. -
Robert Reich: A Thanksgiving Reflection: Looking Beyond Election Day
November 2011Why we should be worrying less about how America’s economy will influence Obama’s reelection and more on how to solve the problems with which whoever wins in 2012 will have to deal with. -
Peter Van Buren: No Free Speech at Mr. Jefferson’s Library
November 2011
How “rights” are increasingly meant for those who behave themselves and don’t exercise them. -
Robin Yassin-Kassab: Reporting Syria
November 2011How journalists Robert Fisk, Nir Rosen, and Joseph Massad have framed Syria all wrong. -
Rebecca Solnit: Ms. Civil Society v. Mr. Unaccountable
November 2011
How ten years after 9/11 Occupy Wall Street may signify a return to a civil society. -
Justin Alvarez: Show, Don’t Tell
November 2011How does the 2008 global financial recession impact the U.S. versus Europe? (Now with visuals!) -
Andy Kroll: Occupy Wall Street’s Political Victory in Ohio
November 2011
The unsung victors in the hottest election of 2011. -
Elizabeth Kadetsky: Joiners and Haters
November 2011
What the womblike warmth of being a part of something means for Penn State. -
November 18, 2011—Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens for Legitimate Government
November 2011Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group. -
Alan Chin: Occupy Wall Street’s Eviction
November 2011
Photographs from Occupy Wall Street’s eviction from Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park/Liberty Plaza on November 15th. -
Lex Paulson: Applied Classics: Aristotle and the Supercommittee
November 2011How Greek philosophy can solve America’s budget crisis. -
Thomas Friedman—Greenwashing Imperial Messenger?
November 2011
In this excerpt from her latest book, Belén Fernández gapes incredulously at the logical missteps of a three-time Pulitzer winner. -
Rebecca Bates: 101 Ways to Be Impossible
November 2011
The Impossible Project gets crafty with instant film. -
Tom Engelhardt: How the Movies Saved My Life
November 2011Seeing the world in black and white (with subtitles). -
Justin Alvarez: The Balance Between Love and Hate
November 2011Is the United Colors of Benetton’s new UNHATE campaign a stroke of genius or a tasteless stunt? -
Conversations With History: Rogers M. Smith on Politics and American Political Ideals
November 2011In a video conversation with Harry Kreisler, the political scientist Rogers M. Smith discusses the importance of building community and political identity and the increasing polarization around issues of inequality and relative international decline. -
VIDEO: Larry Siems on The Torture Report
November 2011Larry Siems dissects 140,000 government documents to get at the real story behind U.S. torture. -
Alexis Rizzuto: A Tar Sands Explainer
November 2011
How great a green victory was the president’s decision to reexamine the tar sands pipeline? An eco activist explains. -
Robert Reich: Occupiers Occupied
November 2011Occupy Wall Street and the hijacking of the First Amendment. -
Robin Yassin-Kassab: Peace Be Upon Syria
November 2011Syrian actress Fadwa Sulaiman releases a video statement and talks about the possibility of getting arrested. -
Bill McKibben: Is Global Warming an Election Issue After All?
November 2011It’s time for Americans to wake up to climate change. -
Robin Yassin-Kassab: Stranger Magic
November 2011A review of Stranger Magic, “a post-Saidean endeavor to uncover ‘a neglected story of reciprocity and exchange.’” -
Robert Reich: Why We May Be In Store for a Passionless Presidential Race
November 2011Only a couple of months before the presidential race begins. Don’t expect any surprises. -
Genevieve Walker: The Bunny Stigma
November 2011Hugh Hefner was once called a protofeminist and a social radical. But it’s been a while. -
Andrew Bacevich: The Passing of the Postwar Era
November 2011
How the United States’s international order has faded. -
Justin Alvarez: Haskell Wexler at Occupy L.A.
November 2011Academy Award-winning cinematographer and long-time activist Haskell Wexler points his camera at Occupy L.A. -
November 11, 2011—Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens for Legitimate Government
November 2011Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group. -
Robert Reich: Trigger Happy
November 2011Why deficit cuts should be triggered only when unemployment reaches 5 percent. -
Glenna Gordon: Liberia’s Fraught Election
November 2011
Photographer Glenna Gordon captures Liberia’s first independent presidential elections and the rough aftermath. -
Sarah Mathews: No, You’re the Cunty One!
November 2011
A feminist comedian rethinks a four letter word. -
Sherrilyn A. Ifill: Dear Camp Cain: Stop Calling It a Lynching
November 2011
Whatever one thinks of either Thomas or Cain, neither is the victim of a lynching, and their deliberate invocation of the racial crime to shield their own conduct from scrutiny is an insult. -
Robert Reich: A Corporate Pledge of Allegiance
November 2011If corporations do not take the pledge, we should boycott them. (Occupiers—are you listening?) -
Justin Alvarez: Joe Frazier, A True Champion
November 2011Remembering former World Heavyweight boxing champion Joe Frazier, who died yesterday at 67. -
Russ Baker: Corporate Media Stumped on How to Cover the Occupy Movement
November 2011
Does conventional journalism fail to do Occupy Wall Street justice? -
Justin Alvarez: Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Waste Land
November 2011A review of Phantom Limb Company’s 69°S. at Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival. -
Frances Fox Piven: How the 99% Could Stop the War Against the Poor
November 2011
We desperately need a movement for a new kind of moral economy. Occupy Wall Street may well be its beginning. -
Robin Yassin-Kassab: Syrian Eid al-Adha 2011
November 2011The address of Syrian National Council President, Dr. Burhan Ghalyoun, to the Syrian nation. -
November 4, 2011—Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens for Legitimate Government
November 2011Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group. -
David Chura: First the Good News: At-Risk Kids (May) Get Some Justice
November 2011
News on juveniles in the federal justice system. -
Robert Reich: Washington, Pre-Occupied
November 2011Until we reverse the trend toward inequality, the economy can’t be revived. -
Sergio Chejfec: A Machine of Illusions
November 2011
The Argentine writer on the English translation of his novel My Two Worlds, its meandering motifs, and its desire to remain or disappear. -
Ann Jones: The Incredible Shrinking Woman in Post-9/11 Hell
November 2011
One citizen’s misadventure in Securityland. -
Carole Joffe: Turning the Telephones on the Anti-Choice Bullies
November 2011
How one man fought back against the “civilians in the abortion wars.” -
Robert Reich: Greece’s Choice—and Ours: Democracy or Finance?
November 2011Rule by democracy or by financial markets? Based on what’s happened in America, choose the former. -
Carmen García Durazo: PAGE TURNER 2011: “Hanging Out” with Junot Díaz and Min Jin Lee
November 2011
A breakdown of the Brooklyn literary festival that dark, snowy Saturday. -
Jesse Tangen-Mills: Mark Twain and Rubén Darío: The Prince and the Pauper
November 2011
North America’s most famous comic author proves to Latin America’s most influential poet that sometimes a person never really dies. -
Lawrence Weschler: The Art of the Shakedown, from the Nile to the Potomac
November 2011
How corruption in the U.S. puts everyday corruption in Africa to shame. -
Conversations With History: Eric Foner on Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery
November 2011In a video conversation with Harry Kreisler, the historian discusses Lincoln’s relationship to slavery over the course of his career and the comparisons between Lincoln and President Obama and the political situations they have confronted. -
Lex Paulson: Applied Classics: Qaddafi, Rome, and the Perils of Tyrannicide
October 20113 reasons why present-day Libya and ancient Rome are more similar than you think. -
Tom Engelhardt: Wall Street by the Book
October 2011A (self-)graduation speech for the occupiers of Zuccotti Park. -
Genevieve Walker: The Intelligent Dysfunction of We Live Here
October 2011Kazan’s play is full of the “come to dinner!” kind of hollering that merely stands in for familial normalcy that never really happens outside of television. -
Jake Whitney: Will a Skeptic’s Study Confirming Global Warming Lead to a Change in the Deniers’ Talking Points?
October 2011
Long-time climate change skeptic Richard Muller may be singing a different tune, but global warming deniers will continue to deny its dangers and that humans are fueling it. -
Chip Ward: Someone Got Rich, and Someone Got Sick
October 2011
What if the assault on America’s middle class and the assault on the environment are one and the same? -
Rebecca Bates: Comic Con Tales from Behind the Booth
October 2011
Glimpses into adult Halloween, where delusion is (more than) a costume you wear as second skin and candy is JJ Abrams’s used napkin. -
J.E. Hamilton: The Spanish Summer: Notes Towards a Comparative Revolutionology
October 2011
A look at the Spanish side of Occupy Wall street:los indignados. -
Guernica at PAGE TURNER: The Asian American Literary Festival
October 2011Guernica editor Joel Whitney and other Guernica contributers will participate at this weekend’s PAGE TURNER: The Asian American Literary Festival. -
Glenn Greenwald: Immunity and Impunity in Elite America
October 2011
How the legal system was deep-sixed and Occupy Wall Street swept the land. -
Stacey Mickelbart: Brecht’s Imperfect Opera Meets OWS
October 2011
OWS’s rhetoric may not be fool-proof, but if you could ask Brecht, he ’d say that’s no problem. -
Barbara Ehrenreich: Homeless in America
October 2011
Why homelessness is becoming an Occupy Wall Street issue. -
Jillian Steinhauer: In Defense of Youth Activism and the “Like” Button
October 2011Are young people not entitled to political opinions, or do opinions simply not count when they come from anyone under 30? -
October 21, 2011—Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens for Legitimate Government
October 2011Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group. -
Guernica at the Asian American Literary Awards
October 2011Guernica contributors Amitava Kumar and Oliver de la Paz honored for literary excellence. -
Rob Goodman: The Abuse of Symbolism
October 2011
Why English teachers love symbolism, and why that’s a problem. -
Rafia Zakaria: The Art of Survival
October 2011
Art and artifacts are expressions of the intangible; they are by definition tenuous and fragile. Pakistani art and music poised at the cusp of actual annihilation is even more so. -
Tom Engelhardt: Bailing Out the Complex
October 2011Is the National Security Complex too big to fail? -
Conversations With History: Pranab Bardhan Assesses the Economic Rise of India and China
October 2011In a video conversation with Harry Kreisler, the political economist cuts through the hype surrounding India & China’s rise, how socialism laid the groundwork for it and India’s edge. -
Elliot Ross: Anthology of Martyrs
October 2011
A review of Jack Mapanje’s memoir, And Crocodiles are Hungry at Night -
Lex Paulson: The Egyptian Revolution: A Metaphysical Primer
October 2011
Forget what the talking heads have told you about the spectral Muslim Brotherhood or the halting momentum of the Arab Spring. There are 3 simple truths to understanding the Egyptian Revolution. -
Guernica at the PEN 2011 Literary Awards
October 2011
“Well, you better stop crying and start writing.” -
Michael Mehaffy and Nikos A. Salingaros: The Architect Has No Clothes
October 2011
Why does modern design tend to look so harsh and feel so unhospitable? -
Rebecca Solnit: Letter to a Dead Man About the Occupation of Hope
October 2011This land is your (occupied) land. -
Claire Lambrecht: Town Crier Michael Lewis Travels the New Third World
October 2011
A review of Michael Lewis’s new book, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World, which illuminates the underpinnings of the global financial crisis. -
Aaron Gilbreath: A Bag Isn’t Just a Bag
October 2011
Portland, Oregon, is the latest city to initiate a ban on plastic grocery bags. In celebration of the bag ban, our writer, a Powell’s Books cashier, offers a sampling of responses to his question, “Would you like a bag?” -
Robin Yassin-Kassab: Thank You So Much
October 2011A message from the father of the murdered nine-year-old Ibrahim Shayban to Russia, China and Bashaar al-Asad. -
Craig Reinbold: Further Reading After “The Many Ways to Die”
October 2011
What to read after Craig Reinbold’s feature on the Tucson shootings, reading W.G. Sebald, the limitations of love, and how we manage to keep going. -
Nick Turse: Mapping America’s Shadowy Drone Wars
October 2011America’s secret empire of drone bases—its full extent exposed for the first time. -
Aaron Shulman: Letter from Spain: Occupy Wall Street Abroad
October 2011
A look at how Occupy Wall Street is inspiring global demonstrations, including Spain’s 15th of May movement. -
October 14, 2011—Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens for Legitimate Government
October 2011Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. -
Anthony Kammer: The Eternal Politics of Debt and Forgiveness
October 2011
A review of early Occupy Wall Street organizer David Graeber’s latest book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years. -
Robert Reich: The Triumph of Dogma, and a Sad Goodbye to David Frum
October 2011Was it David Frum’s responsibility to “represent” the views of conservative Republicans? He thought so, at least. -
Andrew B. Eisenman: Flash Fiction: The Volunteer Hospital
October 2011
The emptied mother shifts dreamily under heavy anesthetic. -
Steve Fraser: The All-American Occupation: A Century of Our Streets Vs. Wall Street
October 2011
If Occupy Wall Street signals the end of our own, atypical period of acquiescence, could a return to a version of “class warfare” that would, once upon a time, have been familiar to so many Americans be on the horizon? -
Joshua Hammer: Weighed Down by a Good Meal
October 2011
The author reflects on an innocent comment he’d made years earlier about a meal—a compliment that would brand him in some people’s eyes as a dangerous, pro-Palestinian stooge. -
Jake Whitney: 5 Republican Talking Points on the Economy Quickly Exploded
October 2011The stimulus was a failure? Taxing “job creators” will crush the economy? Think again. -
A. Igoni Barrett: Flash Fiction: To Fall Twice for the Same Trick (or Déjà Vu)
October 2011
I took a deep breath, and then struggled to my feet to answer what did not sound like any phone I knew… -
Bill McKibben: Where Did the President’s Mojo Go?
October 2011
Instead of using all those millions of supporters to force through ambitious health-care proposals or serious climate legislation or [fill in the blank yourself here], Barack Obama governed as the opposite of a movement candidate. -
Anthony Cudahy: An Evolving Dialogue
October 2011
The young artist on his relationship with the persons he portrays, what he finds frightening in his own work, and the power of filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. -
Lauren Spohrer: Flash Fiction: The Numbers
October 2011
It’s more lively, you see, when something has to come out that’s unexpected. -
Ariel Dorfman: A Warning for Barack Obama
October 2011
Salvador Allende has words for Barack Obama from the other side of death. -
October 7, 2011—Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens for Legitimate Government
October 2011Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. -
Andy Kroll: Flat-Lining the Middle Class
October 2011The deep polarization between the very rich and everyone else has been decades in the making and is a global phenomenon. Reversing it could be the task of a lifetime. -
Hunter Braithwaite: A White Void
October 2011
Photographer Clifford Owens’s show Photographs with an Audience stands as an antidote to the distance and simulacra currently dictating how people interact with each other and themselves. -
Guernica Contributor Tomas Tranströmer Wins Nobel Prize in Literature
October 2011Congrats to the Swedish poet and Guernica contributor. -
Duncan Murrell: Occupy Wall Street, Liberate America
October 2011
“Occupy” fine and all, but #OccupyWallStreet should consider a new verb. -
Patrick Young: Dismissing #OccupyWallStreet—We Got it Wrong, So What Now?
October 2011
A union organizer’s perspective on the Occupy Wall Street project: Is it too early to define the movement? -
Justin Alvarez: Wikipedia, Italian-Style
October 2011Wikipedia shuts down its Italian site in response to Italian Prime Minister’s speech restrictions. -
John Feffer: Why 2012 Will Shake Up Asia and the World
October 2011
Can Washington Move from Pacific Power to Pacific Partner? -
Harry Kreisler: Conversations With History: The Future of Economic Growth in a Multispeed World
October 2011Series host Harry Kreisler interviews Michael Spence, Nobel Laureate in Economics. -
Jillian Steinhauer: A Case of “Contagious Shooting”
October 2011How are tightening gun laws and reining in illegal firearms going to solve excessive gun use when uniformed men and women are still legally carrying lethal weapons out in the streets? -
Event: Book Launch for Erica Wright’s Instructions for Killing the Jackal
October 2011
Join Guernica for a reading and reception to celebrate the publication of Erica Wright’s debut collection. -
Robert Reich: The American Jobs Depression, and How to Get Out of It
October 2011We’re in a deep hole—and the hole is deepening. -
Noam Chomsky: My Response to #OccupyWallStreet
October 2011
With #OccupyWallStreet, the linguist and political critic sees a reason for hope that lies closer to home. -
Peter Van Buren: Chickening Out in Iraq
October 2011
How your tax dollars financed “reconstruction” madness in the Middle East. -
September 30, 2011—Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens for Legitimate Government
September 2011Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. -
Joel Whitney: #OccupyWallStreet’s Declaration
September 2011#OccupyWallStreet releases a declaration to the media. -
Tom Engelhardt: Washington’s Field of Screams
September 2011In the last decade, there has been only one definition that truly matters: the almost instantaneous post-9/11 insistence that we are “at war,” and not even in a specific war or set of wars, but in an all-encompassing one. -
Joel Whitney: NYPD Blues: Why Thuggishness Helps OccupyWallStreet
September 2011Protestors contrast their own nonviolence with the brash violence of the state to draw public sympathy. -
Jake Whitney: Muhammad Yunus and His Bonsai People
September 2011A new film about Muhammad Yunus, Bonsai People may be a moving tribute to the Nobel Peace Laureate, but the Bangladeshi government isn’t showing Yunus much love. -
Justin Alvarez: Why Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah Is Still Not Doing Enough for His Country’s Women
September 2011How can a woman run for office in Saudi Arabia if no one knows who she is? -
Peter Van Buren: Freedom Isn’t Free at the State Department: The Only Employee at State Who May Be Fired Because of WikiLeaks
September 2011
Is our nation so fragile that legitimate criticism becomes a firing offense? -
Glenna Gordon: “Two Wives: Nollywood”
September 2011A series of photographs inspired by Nigeria’s film industry that demonstrates the possibility for multiple narratives within the same space. -
Guernica Contributor Nathan Schneider on Democracy Now! About #OccupyWallStreet
September 2011A response to the #OccupyWallStreet campaign, now on Day 10. -
Robert Reich: Why This is Exactly the Time to Rebuild America’s Infrastructure
September 2011If Washington only had a brain… -
Jalees Rehman: “Occidentophobia”: The Elephant in the Room
September 2011
Is the Muslim anti-Western prejudice due to ignorance, or is it the consequence of a very selective view of Western society? -
Pepe Escobar: The West and the Rest in a One-Model-Fits-All World: The Decline and Fall of Just About Everyone
September 2011
If the West is going down, and Atlantic bust is giving way to Pacific boom, what’s to be made of the fate of a planet in the embrace of a single grim model of economic “development?” -
Inside the Wall Street Protests: An Eyewitness Account of Police Crackdown on Peaceful Demonstrators
September 2011
Protesters from the week-old “occupation” in New York’s financial district were arrested, penned up, and Maced on Saturday when the NYPD showed up to their march. -
September 23, 2011—Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens for Legitimate Government
September 2011Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. -
Justin Alvarez: Welcome, South Sudan, to Google Maps! It’s Only Been Two Months Since Your Independence
September 2011If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If a country is not on a map, is it a country? -
David R. Dow: Troy Davis: Why Poster Boys Don’t Matter
September 2011
Is the Troy Davis case the tipping point on the capital punishment debate? Unfortunately, not until the majority of Americans believes that killing—even an unquestionably guilty murderer—is wrong. -
Sandy Tolan: It’s the Occupation, Stupid: The State to Which the U.N. May Grant Membership Is Disappearing
September 2011
By anyone’s measure the Israelis are winning the war of and on the land. However, the culture of occupation is a lonely place. -
Robin Yassin-Kassab: Blind Orthodoxies
September 2011What a sad world we live in, where we have almost no space in it for honest exploration. -
Joel Whitney: Save Troy Davis: Judge’s Email
September 2011Others have posted the phone number. Here is the email address of the judge who can allegedly prevent Davis’s execution. -
Genevieve Walker: Lost In Translation
September 2011The “Social Media” exhibit at New York City’s Pace Gallery explores the way social media provides a peek at the new ways people can emote, communicate, and connect with each other. -
Joel Whitney: Over-Educated?
September 2011The generation just out of college has done some cool stuff, but it hasn’t cured cancer. -
Tom Engelhardt: Scamming Washington: Exclusive Letters from the ScamiLeaks Archives
September 2011Who knew that the highest officials in Washington receive scam “Nigerian” letters as well? -
Mandy Van Deven: America’s Winter of Discontent: A Review of the New Anthology We Are Wisconsin
September 2011
The question We Are Wisconsin raises is, what will come next, now that the hornet’s nest has been disturbed? -
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd: 8 Reasons Nirvana’s Nevermind Is The Most Important Rock Album of All Time
September 2011
This week marks the 20th anniversary of Nirvana’s magnum opus. Here’s why it’s better than any of the rest. -
Nick Turse: Obama’s Arc of Instability: Destabilizing the World One Region at a Time
September 2011A startling number of nations in the global south are now in turmoil, and in every single one of them—from Afghanistan and Algeria to Yemen and Zambia—Washington is militarily involved, overtly or covertly, in outright war or what passes for peace. -
Sam Kerbel: The Tree of Lacrimosa
September 2011Zbigniew Preisner’s Requiem for my friend headlines a magnificent score that complements the sublimity of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. -
Jillian Steinhauer: The Elements of F*cking Style
September 2011The “f*cking” in Chris Baker and Jacob Hansen’s The Elements of Style parody is a bit desperate, but any effort to get people to write better and to make grammar sexy seems worthwhile. -
2nd Annual Dzanc Books / Guernica International Literature Award Opens, Judged by Colson Whitehead
September 2011The winner will receive airfare, tuition, and accommodations to the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon and publication in Guernica. -
Tad Crawford: A Memory of Attica on the Fortieth Anniversary of the Prison Revolt
September 2011
A first-person account of what really happened at Attica prison in September 1971. -
Harry Kreisler: Conversations With History: Pakistan
September 2011Series host Harry Kreisler interviews Anatol Lieven, author and Professor of War Studies at King’s College, London. -
Alan Chin: “The 9/11 Decade”: Beyond Pushpins On A Calendar
September 2011
A reflection on the September 11 attacks, in fourteen parts. -
Robert Reich: How to Create More Jobs By Lowering Wages: Texas and America
September 2011The productivity of American workers continues to soar. The problem is fewer and fewer Americans are sharing the gains. -
Mike Davis: Edward Gibbon at America’s Grave: What the Future Will Remember About America’s Decline and Fall
September 2011
These days every crisis in American society can be transformed with remarkable ease into eyeball-gluing screen fare. Politics is now part of bread-and-circus time in the increasingly chaotic American version of empire. -
Sarah Jaffe: Are Jobs on Their Way to Becoming Obsolete? And Is That a Good Thing?
September 2011
Do we have it backward when we call for job creation? Could we instead radically rethink our economy to benefit everyone? -
Joanna Eede: “Trucks of Men” Brutally Attack Indigenous Brazilians
September 2011The Guarani Indians communities of Pyelito Kuê and M’barakai are forced to run to safety after their huts are set alight, clothes burnt, and families threatened by armed men. -
John Sevigny: From the Grave, de Kooning Challenges the “Death of Painting”
September 2011Is painting dead? The Willem de Kooning retrospective opening at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art on September 18th re-opens the debate. -
Julia Grønnevet: Wild Ducks and Fascists: Wartime in Norway
September 2011What Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck tells us about Anders Behring Breivik and his false understanding of the world. -
Claire Lambrecht: No Sound, But So Loud
September 2011The International Center of Photography’s installation, “Memory Remains: 9/11 Artifacts in Hangar 17,” reminds us how simple items, such as an aging subway ad and a newspaper clipping, have the ability to access a truth that exceeds the grasp of words. -
Steve Fraser and Josh Freeman: Uncle Sam Does(n’t) Want You: America’s Reserve Army of Labor Marches Through Time
September 2011
The unemployment rate officially stands at 9.1% and last month saw zero job growth. Think of this year’s Labor Day as our country’s economic 9/11. -
Majed Neisi: The Heroin Lab of Darayem
September 2011
Iranian-Arab filmmaker Majed Neisi attempts to shoot a heroin lab… at great risk to his own life. -
September 10, 2011—Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens for Legitimate Government
September 2011Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. -
Nigel Young: 9/11: Working in the Fields of Memory
September 2011
As we near the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, it is important that we consider how we choose to remember. -
Joanna Eede: Brazilian Indians Demand Shell Leave Their Land
September 2011While people continue to buy Shell’s ethanol as an “ethical” alternative to fossil fuels, there’s nothing ethical about its horrendous treatment of the Guarani Indians of Brazil. -
Matt Petronzio: 6 Male Poets Who Are Not Afraid to Write About Feminism
September 2011
The web is teeming with lists of feminist poets, but there are some men (all too few) who aren’t afraid to write about women. -
Tom Engelhardt: Let’s Cancel 9/11: Bury the War State’s Blank Check at Sea
September 2011Our “ceremonies of hubris” have for the last decade provided a blank check to the war state, so isn’t it time to start talking about how to end them? A call to end our 9/11 ceremonies and rip the Band-Aid off the wound. -
Rebecca Bates: Mr. McKibben Goes to Washington: The Final Anti-Tar Sands Pipeline Rally
September 2011
These days it seems you can’t be a real environmentalist without a rap sheet… but to what avail? -
Jim Shultz: Protests Erupt in the U.S. and Bolivia Targeting “Progressive” Presidents Who Are Failing to Protect the Environment
September 2011
Together these two actions highlight important, universal lessons about what it takes to press for protection of the planet, in countries both wealthy and impoverished. -
Claire Lambrecht: Welcome to Ost
September 2011The skeletons of the lost Soviet empire continue to fascinate Americans. -
Tim Peters: A Sentimental Correspondence
September 2011
A literary infographic on love, travel, and When Harry Met Sally…. -
David Sirota: China’s Making Everything in the U.S. From Bridges to Civil Rights Memorials: That’s a Huge Problem and China’s Not To Blame
September 2011
The Chinese invasion tells us the true problem is that America is no longer willing or able to invest in its own future. -
Anthony Cuthbertson: Radical Thinking to Recreate and Reimagine Our Cities
September 2011
Some “nutty” ideas tried years ago by “wild and crazy” Latin American mayors might offer inspiration for a world seeking urban reinvention. -
Noam Chomsky: Was There an Alternative?: Looking Back on 9/11 a Decade Later
September 2011Osama bin Laden may be dead, but his American legacy lives on fiercely in Washington policy when it comes to surveillance, secrecy, war, and the national security state (as well as economic meltdown at home). -
Robert Reich: Why Inequality Is the Real Cause of Our Ongoing Terrible Economy
September 2011Historian James Truslow Adams coined the American Dream as “a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone;” however, unless you're one of the 5 percent of Americans with the highest incomes, this land is still merely a dream. -
Joshua Holland: Are Wikileaks and Anonymous Hackers All There Is Left We Can Rely On, with Trust in Business and Government at Rock Bottom?
September 2011
Their ability to bring powerful giants to heel is as compelling as the mythical Robin Hood’s battle with a haughty medieval aristocracy. -
Genevieve Walker: The Unbearable Lightness of Books
September 2011While book sales are making a comeback the question remains, will e-books continue to make thousand-percent leaps in growth, eventually swallowing the book publishing industry whole? -
Mallika Kaur: Grave Lessons from Kashmir
September 2011
For the anniversary of the International Day of the Disappeared, our writer reports on Kashmir’s “half widows” and their unaddressed needs, which threaten to fuel further insecurity in the volatile region and globally. -
Mark Winne: Troubled By Paradise
September 2011
To grow and sell a half-million dollars of organic fruits and vegetables every year is no small feat. But to raise dozens of young leaders who can restore the economic and physical health of their people would no doubt bring a smile to the ancient kings and queens of Hawaii. -
Kaye Cain-Nielsen: Trecartin and His Mad World
September 2011Although it sort of hurts the mind, watching artist Ryan Trecartin’s creations elicits transcendental pain. -
September 2, 2011—Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens for Legitimate Government
September 2011Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. -
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd: 10 Best Movies Where Humanity Gets Its Comeuppance
September 2011Humanity does terrible things to the earth and to each other. But Hollywood loves to depict our punishment. -
Russ Baker: Now That We’re Celebrating Qaddafi’s End, Can We Get A Little Truth?
September 2011As the dust settles in Libya, it’s starting to look suspiciously like an invasion for spoils. -
Harry Kreisler: Conversations With History: Nigeria
September 2011Series host Harry Kreisler interviews John Campbell, former U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria. -
Susanne Slavick: Out of Rubble: How Art Helps Us Recast 9/11 and Imagine a Peaceful World
September 2011
On “10 Years And Counting,” an all-inclusive, activist artist movement starting in September. -
Robin Yassin-Kassab: Libyans: Passive Tools?
August 2011While many anti-Libyan commentators have felt free to make sweeping predictions about Libya and the Libyans without actually possessing any knowledge of the people or the country, the people are by no means passive and are not in the mood to exchange one tyranny with another. -
Justin Alvarez: U.S. Eco-Activist Tim DeChristopher Speaks Out From Prison
August 2011DeCristopher may be serving a two-year sentence, but that doesn’t mean he’ll keep his outrage to himself. -
Joshua Holland: The 10 States With the Worst Economies In America
August 2011The global economic crash hurt everyone, but not equally; here are the states that are feeling the greatest economic pain. -
Medea Benjamin: No Way to Honor Dr. King
August 2011
The tribute to peacemakers, organized by the MLK National Memorial Foundation, was mostly a night applauding warmakers, corporate profiteers and co-opted musicians. -
Jillian Steinhauer: Reach The Skies!
August 2011Digital designer Mike Bodge’s new Web project, N SKY C, allows users to get up close and personal with the colors of the sky. -
Nicola Twilley: The Politics of Our Changing Foodscape
August 2011
A Q&A with the food writer on her blog’s inspiration, the Foodprint Project, and why food is a political issue. -
Zafar Anjum: Fighting Corruption In India
August 2011
More important than wholesale and retail corruption is the moral corruption that has to be checked. This can only be stopped if we are ready to suffer by not giving, or accepting, bribes. Indian citizens have to go through that painful phase. -
Max Blumenthal and Joseph Dana: How Could the Largest Social Justice Movement in Israel’s History Manage to Ignore the Country’s Biggest Moral Disaster?
August 2011
The decision to exclude the occupation from the grievances of the July 14 Tent City movement was entirely organic. The key question is why. -
Joshua Holland: The 10 States With the Best Economies in America
August 2011Not all states have experienced the same kind of economic pain since the Great Recession began. -
Sarah Jaffe: NY Attorney General Schneiderman Removed From Foreclosure Settlement Group For Doing His Job
August 2011As scrutiny intensifies on Bank of America and pressure for a settlement mounts, Schneiderman isn’t backing down. -
Robert Reich: This Labor Day We Need Protest Marches Rather than Parades
August 2011The ratio of corporate profits to wages is now higher than at any time since just before the Great Depression. It’s time for the American worker to do something about it. -
Spencer Mandel: Let Them Eat Baklava: Food Prices And The Arab Spring
August 2011
Studies show a paradigm shift in food prices could also mean a broader increase in violence in the developing world in the near future. We have been warned. -
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd: 8 Ways Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert Show More Leadership Than Our “Leaders”
August 2011Why are two comedians stronger beacons for the American people than our elected officials? -
August 26, 2011—Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens for Legitimate Government
August 2011Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. -
Bill McKibben: Arrested at the White House: Acting as a Living Tribute to Martin Luther King
August 2011Making clear that civil disobedience is not just history in America is vital, even if that means standing in front of the White House in handcuffs. -
Tom Engelhardt: Details of Secret Pact Emerge: Troops Stuck in Afghanistan Until 2024
August 2011If you thought President Obama was ending the war in Afghanistan, think again. Your children will be fighting it in 2024 if the Pentagon has its way. -
David Chura: A Global History Lesson in Hope
August 2011There are people out there who care about real justice, not just for the “done to” but for the “doer” as well; who worry not only about “the system”—child welfare, juvenile and criminal justice—but about the kids in the system. -
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd: Are These TV Programs Really Destroying Society? Five Vilified Shows Critics Have Got Wrong
August 2011These are the worst shows on television. Or are they? -
Deborah Glassman: A Prayer For Rain: Tunisia’s Next Steps
August 2011While many Tunisians remain unconvinced that things will change, others are impatient with the transition government that cannot bring about the changes they want quickly. Tunisians need to take the future into their own hands by voting. -
Mikhal Dekel: Where Have All The Protesters Gone?
August 2011
Will the social protests die, now that a new stage in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems upon us? -
Rafia Zakaria: City Of The Almost-Dead
August 2011What are the consequences of living among constant violence? -
Dr. Stuart Jeanne Bramhall: Did Fracking Cause the Virginia Earthquake?
August 2011Obama and the EPA need to stop “studying” the issue and finally show some testicularity in standing up to the energy companies that are financing his 2012 campaign. -
Joshua Holland: Media Malpractice: CBS Pins Bush Debt On Obama
August 2011Get the facts straight—the current economic distress began under Bush. -
Andy Kroll: The Badger State’s Bloody Stalemate: What Comes Next For Wisconsin’s Fledgling Uprising
August 2011Consider Ohio Governor John Kasich’s sudden concession gesture a straw in the wind, but just where and how strongly that wind is blowing is anybody’s guess. -
Lauren Kelly: 10 Faux Progressive Companies… With Some Dirty Secrets
August 2011Many of these companies have earned credibility among progressives, despite having a poor track record with the environment, sexism, union busting, monopolizing, and more. -
Justin Alvarez: A Crisis In India
August 2011Writer Arundhati Roy blasts Anna Hazare’s hunger strike protesting the Indian government’s Lokpal Bill. However, she’s just one against thousands of supporters. -
Karen J. Greenberg: Crisis of Confidence: How Washington Lost Faith in America’s Courts
August 2011Can you even remember the world before 9/11? Now, barely noticed, basic American institutions are starting to wobble under the strain of our post-9/11 world. -
Courtney E. Martin: The World Is Whose?: Beyonce, Nas, and the Politics of Utopia
August 2011How a speech at the Lower East Side Girls Club forces the author to question the version of freedom that is often misrepresented by pop culture. -
Justin Alvarez: The Same Old Song (3 Trillion Years Ago)
August 2011New York Fringe Festival wonder boys Greg Kotis and Mark Hollman return to the launching pad of their Tony-winning musical Urinetown, but their new show Yeast Nation is a real gas. Literally. -
Robert Reich: Stock Tip: Be Worried. Workers Are Consumers
August 2011Corporate earnings are the highest they’ve been relative to worker wages and benefits since just before the Great Depression. It was only a matter of time before the boom on Wall Street turned into a bust. -
Robin Yassin-Kassab: Victory in Tripoli
August 2011As rebels take control over Tripoli from Qaddafi, the question now lies in where the country shall go from here. -
Mikhal Dekel: The Tel Aviv Spring: Mass Demonstrations with a Cheesy Origin
August 2011The recent protests and rallies in Tel Aviv are evidence that today’s twenty-somethings are suddenly realizing what they have traded in for their supposedly higher, more Americanized “lifestyle.” -
August 19, 2011—Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens for Legitimate Government
August 2011Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. -
Guernica Contributors Nominated for the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize
August 2011Congrats to Guernica contributors Patricia Engel, Assaf Gavron, Stephan Salisbury and Zoya Phan and interviewees Howard Zinn and Ayaan Hirsi Ali for their nominations. -
Sofian Khan: Shooting Osama
August 2011
A filmmaker reflects on his experience making a film re-enactment of Osama bin Laden’s death in Pakistan and how nothing ever appears as it seems. -
Harry Kreisler: Conversations With History: Searching for Meaning in a Secular Age
August 2011Series host Harry Kreisler interviews UC Berkeley’s Hubert Dreyfus and Harvard’s Sean Dorrance Kelly, Professors of Philosphy. -
John Sevigny: Open Letter to Georgia Governor Nathan Deal
August 2011In protest of the illegal, immoral and cruel Georgia state law known as HB 87, Sevigny asks Deal, “What kind of Southern man are you?” -
David Bromwich: Symptoms of the Bush-Obama Presidency: The Saved and the Sacked
August 2011On January 21, 2009, Barack Obama promised to return America to “the high moral ground.” Two and a half years later, we’re still waiting. -
Guernica Essay “An Unfortunate Discharge” Chosen for Best Sex Writing 2012
August 2011From its opening line, “My first year in the United States Navy, I let another boy give me a blow job,” we knew we in for a wild ride. -
Don Hazen: The “Unfashionable” Matt Damon, Mensch of the Year
August 2011Damon breaks out of Hollywood and into serious activism, earning the respect of hard-working activists and progressive leaders alike. -
Justin Alvarez: We’re All In This Together (Online)
August 2011PBS Arts’s new video series Off Book explores new definitions of art. Their latest episode explores the world of online memes and remixes. Yes, that includes the Youtube Nyan Cat. -
Russ Baker: Who—And What—Are Behind The “Official History” Of The Bin Laden Raid?
August 2011When you look closely, nothing seems right about what will surely become the accepted account of the raid that nailed America’s enemy number one. And then things get even weirder… -
Robert Reich: How Austerity Is Ushering in a Global Recession
August 2011When economies stop growing or contract, economies can fall into vicious cycles of slower growth, lower tax revenues, spending cuts, and even slower growth. Welcome to our current reality. -
Wendell Potter: Obamacare’s Journey to the Supreme Court
August 2011
What a long, strange trip it’s been. -
Genevieve Walker: Louise Bourgeois, The Mathematician
August 2011Is it possible to express emotion through numbers? -
Rania Khalek: How the Political Right Bullied the Department of Homeland Security Into Ignoring the Threat of Right-Wing Extremism
August 2011After right-wingers freaked out about a report detailing the rise in right-wing extremism, Homeland Security effectively dismantled a unit tasked with tracking it. -
Sarah Jaffe: Is Bank of America Headed Toward Collapse?
August 2011The nation’s largest bank has only gotten bigger since the financial crisis and the government bailouts. But is big trouble ahead for the big bank? -
Adam Lee: Goodbye Religion? How Godlessness Is Increasing With Each New Generation
August 2011This demographic transformation has been in progress ever since World War II, but in recent years it’s begun to seriously pick up steam. -
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd: New Film The Help Whitewashes the Civil Rights Struggle into a Heartstring-Tugging Hallmark Card
August 2011The film completely trivializes the suffering and hard work that went into making civil rights a reality. -
Tony Newman: Why We Need Honest Sex—and Drug—Education in Schools
August 2011NYC’s Mayor Bloomberg has made sex education mandatory, but we need the same thing for drugs—let’s stop pretending that teenagers won’t take them. -
Noam Chomsky: Drug Cartels and the Growing Border War
August 2011In a new interview, linguist and activist Noam Chomsky discusses the drug cartels of Mexico, the government’s error-prone response to the “War on Drugs,” and what the U.S. education system could learn from Mexico. -
August 12, 2011—Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens for Legitimate Government
August 2011Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. -
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd: How Teen Rap Group Odd Future Turned a Posse of Nerdy White Male Critics Into Rape Apologists
August 2011As extremist conservatives push the discourse ever rightward, a long-running conversation about hip-hop group Odd Future indicates cultural criticism might be following. -
Tom Engelhardt: Could the Pentagon Be Responsible for Your Death? The Military’s Marching Orders to the Jihadist World
August 2011A look at a potentially shocking Pentagon program to influence jihadis online that someone in Congress should investigate fast. -
Joanna Eede: You Can’t Google It and Get It Back
August 2011Why the death of tribal languages matters. -
Laurie Penny: British Riots: Elites “Shocked” The Poor Are Rising Up Against Brutal Austerity Measures
August 2011Angry young people with nothing to do and little to lose are turning on their own communities, and they cannot be stopped, and they know it. -
Robin Yassin-Kassab: Resistance Regime?
August 2011Nobody knows what kind of regime may rise after the Asads. One thing is certain, however: if the next system is to any extent democratic or representative, it will struggle for the rights of the Palestinian people. -
Majed Neisi & Salar Abdoh: The Girls of Opium
August 2011Iranian American writer, Salar Abdoh, corresponds with his friend Majed, a documentary filmmaker, in Afghanistan. Majed reports here on his travels in the Middle East. -
Guernica Contributors Win Big at PEN Literary Awards
August 2011Congrats to Guernica contributors Adam Day, Elliott Holt, and Ishion Hutchinson and Guernica interviewee Stacy Schiff. We’re not surprised you all won. -
Jalees Rehman: From Frankfurt to Utøya (Part 2): The Witch-Hunt for “Cultural Marxists”
August 2011Part two of the author’s report on Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik’s manifesto. What is “cultural Marxism”? -
Robert Reich: Slouching Toward a Double Dip, For No Good Reason
August 2011If our lawmakers continue to obsess about the wrong thing and fail to do what must be done, Americans will only become more fearful, insecure, and angry. -
Noam Chomsky: Public Education Under Massive Corporate Assault—What’s Next?
August 2011Converting schools and universities into facilities that produce commodities for the job market, privatizing them, slashing their budgets—do we really want this future? -
Jalees Rehman: From Frankfurt to Utøya (Part I): The Quest for Monoculturalism
August 2011Part one of the author’s report on how Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik’s manifesto is a valuable guide to understanding contemporary far right ideology and its potential impact. -
Bruce E. Levine: 8 Reasons Young Americans Don’t Fight Back: How the U.S. Crushed Youth Resistance
August 2011The ruling elite has created social institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance. -
Harry Kreisler: Conversations With History: Technology, Culture, and Political Change
August 2011Series host Harry Kreisler interviews UC Berkeley’s Ken Goldberg, Craigslist Distinguished Professor of New Media. -
Rebecca Bates: Soul Selling on Ebay
August 2011Science fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s notated Bible is for sale on Ebay, because we all deserve to get a voyeuristic glimpse into someone else’s serious religious crisis. -
William M. Morgan: Woolf’s Wandering, Solnit’s Wanderlust
August 2011
For Rebecca Solnit and Virginia Woolf, thought travels by detour and collision. -
Rebecca Bates: Food Becomes Bad Porn
August 2011
La Figa: Visions of Food and Form is about “eating well and making love and creating art.” Also, it’s bad. -
Nick Turse: A Secret War in 120 Countries: The Pentagon’s New Power Elite
August 2011Investigative journalist Nick Turse reveals the size and scope of the global war being fought in our name by tens of thousands of secret warriors fighting “in the shadows.” -
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd:10 Years + Counting: Artists Challenge the Dangerous Path Taken By America in the Years After 9/11
August 2011An arts group attempts to transform a national tragedy into a way to take back America. -
Rafia Zakaria: Drones and Democracy
August 2011As American troops withdraw from Afghanistan, we must realize the departure is only the end of the War on Terror. There is a larger, invisible war that will quickly take its place. -
Justin Alvarez: Too Legit to Quit
August 2011Human Rights Watch questions whether the Bush administration will get away with torture. Unfortunately, the answer points to yes. -
Scott Thill: Bitcoin: A New Kind of Money That’s Beyond the Reach of Bankers, Wall St., and Regulators?
August 2011The Internet’s creative hive mind is charting the future of commerce—the bitcoin phenomenon shows what online currencies are capable of. -
Tom Engelhardt: Lowering America's War Ceiling? Imperial Psychosis on Display
August 2011A tour de force exploration of the war crisis that lurks behind the debt-ceiling crisis. -
Rebecca Bates: UN Calls for Release of Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and His Wife
August 2011Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo was imprisoned in 2008 for “inciting subversion” against the motherland. His wife has been under house arrest since 2010. Now the UN has declared their arrests illegal. -
Rebecca Solnit: Hope: The Care and Feeding Of
August 2011How it will all end is anybody’s guess, but the future remains wide open. Not only in the Middle East: everywhere, there are victories and emerging possibilities. You just have to open your eyes. -
David Rosen: Remembering the Bonus Army: Where Are Today’s Mass Nonviolent Protests?
August 2011On July 28, 1932, World War I veterans marched on Washington to demand their service bonus. Today, in the face of austerity, we see very little protest like that march. -
Rania Khalek: 15 Years in Prison For Taping the Cops? How Eavesdropping Laws Are Taking Away Our Best Defense Against Police Brutality
August 2011More and more people use their smartphones to record police misconduct. But laws against wiretapping are being used to intimidate and stop them. -
July 30, 2011—Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens for Legitimate Government
July 2011Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. -
Jo Eede: Five Reasons to Stop Africa’s Tallest Dam
July 2011The construction of a dam in Ethiopia threatens tribes’ standard of living and promises to be profitable only for those already in a position of power. -
Kaye Cain-Nielsen: Sunday at the Sanatorium
July 2011It’s July. New York is hot, smelly, and loud. Pedro Reyes’s Sanatorium offered some participants a chance for calm, self-reflection. -
Andrew Bacevich: Ballpark Liturgy: America’s New Civic Religion: Cheap Grace at Fenway
July 2011A decade of war culminating in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression hasn’t done much good for the country, but it has been strangely good for the Red Sox—and a no-less well funded Pentagon. -
Robert Reich: The Empty Bully Pulpit
July 2011Cat got your tongue? Why Obama isn’t telling America the truth. -
Russ Baker: The New York Times’ Ostrich Act On JFK Assassination Getting Old
July 2011If journalism can’t be trusted, democracy is on a slippery slope. -
Robert Reich: The Biggest Driver in the Deficit Battle: Standard & Poor’s
July 2011Who is Standard & Poor’s to tell America how much debt it has to shed in order to keep its credit rating? -
Justin Alvarez: Last Man Standing?
July 2011Tim DeChristopher isn’t asking for mercy; he’s asking you to join him. -
Majed Neisi & Salar Abdoh: This is Afghanistan
July 2011Iranian American writer, Salar Abdoh, corresponds with his friend Majed, a documentary filmmaker, in Afghanistan. Majed reports here on his travels in the Middle East. -
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd: DSK’s Alleged Victim Is Speaking Out—Will She Get a Shot at Justice?
July 2011Strauss-Kahn is accused of rape. So why does it seem like his victim is on trial? -
Russ Baker: What Rupert Murdoch Means For You Personally
July 2011Twelve points where Murdoch has impacted our world and our lives, even if they are obscured in the daily rush of revelations. -
Tara Lohan: Water Matters
July 2011
Deserts may be patient, they may have all the time in the world, but we don’t. We have to act now. -
Rafia Zakaria: Defeat of the Drones
July 2011An art exhibition attempts to give visual reality to a war that is largely invisible. -
Rob Goodman: When Words Fail: The Tree of Life and Bad Religious Art
July 2011Why does being caught in contradictions often makes us hold on to them even tighter? -
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd: The Liberated Keith Olbermann Is Making Powerful TV
July 2011Notice anything different about one of America’s favorite progressive anchors lately? It’s not just the station… -
John Summers and George Scialabba: Statement in Support of Aaron Swartz
July 2011
The virtual impunity of the rich and powerful is a widely known fact. Why continue to rub our noses in it? -
July 22, 2011—Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens for Legitimate Government
July 2011Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. -
Tom Engelhardt: How Not to Make Friends in the Greater Middle East: Washington’s Singular Accomplishment
July 2011Be proud, America! In the name of security, the U.S. is spreading fear & hate. -
Claire Lambrecht: The Bittersweet Romance of the pre-“High Line” High Line
July 2011Joel Sternfeld’s photographs show us a time when the High Line was a river of grass. -
John Seery: Old Enough To Fight, Old Enough To Vote—Old Enough To Run For Office?
July 2011
40 years ago the 26th Amendment lowered the U.S. voting age from 21 to 18. Now, Professor John Seery, explains to critics why “old enough to fight, old enough to vote,” should also be old enough to run for Congress. -
Holly Welker: Saving One Man From Mormonism or Coercion? Inside Errol Morris’s New Documentary Tabloid
July 2011The fascinating, strange, and sad story of a possibly deluded woman who tried to “rescue” her lover from his chosen religion. -
Robert Reich: The Shameful Murder of Dodd-Frank
July 2011The real reason Wall Street has spent the last year bludgeoning Dodd-Frank into meaninglessness. -
Justin Alvarez: Armond White, You Need A Friend
July 2011An open letter to New York Press film critic Armond White in response to his review of the latest installment of the Harry Potter film series. -
Joshua Holland: No, We Won’t End Up Like Greece: 5 Reasons Conservative Fear-Mongering Is Totally Wrong
July 2011Right-wing media and lawmakers are spinning utterly wrong comparisons between the U.S. and Greece. -
Jay Walljasper: What Happens When You Open the Streets for People
July 2011Closing off streets for the enjoyment of people is a well-tested idea, which happens every Sunday in cities from Bogota to Ontario. -
Christian Parenti: Reading the World In a Loaf of Bread—Soaring Food Prices, Wild Weather, Upheaval, and a Planetful of Trouble
July 2011A brilliant anatomy of a planet in trouble told in terms of a single loaf of Egyptian bread. -
Rebecca Bates: The Writerly Insecurities of Ben Mirov (And How They Are Not a Gimmick)
July 2011In the best way, reading Ben Mirov’s Vortexts is like perpetually trying to recover one’s train of thought mid-sentence but always failing. -
Fred Branfman: Would We Be Better Off If John McCain Were President?
July 2011Presidents serve the institutional interests of the corporations behind them. A President McCain may have at least triggered a true progressive fight. -
Rec Room: Jillian Steinhauer: Errol Morris’s Tabloid
July 2011Per usual, Morris plays up the humor in an already absurd story…only the end result here is a little disappointing. -
Stephan Salisbury: Islam-Baiting Doesn’t Work: It Failed in Campaign 2010 and Will Do Worse in 2012
July 2011
The writer explores how effective railing against Islam has actually been in past election campaigns and the role it might play in 2012. -
Robert Reich: Can Obama Pull a Clinton on the GOP?
July 2011If Obama wants a second term, he’ll have to come out swinging on jobs. -
Kyle Minor: Further Reading After The Sexual Lives of Missionaries
July 2011
What to read after Kyle Minor’s novel excerpt that conflates sex, religion, and the impulse to colonize and dominate. -
Jessica Mack: Boy or Girl? Why Do More Americans Prefer Male Children?
July 2011If you were to have only one child, and could choose its sex, would you prefer a boy or a girl? If you thought “boy,” according to a recent Gallup poll, you’re not alone. -
July 16, 2011—Breaking News and Commentary From Citizens For Legitimate Government
July 2011Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. -
James Schamus: How I Spent My Summer Vacation, or Adorno in Ramallah
July 2011
Screenwriter and professor James Schamus was invited to the West Bank to teach a class for Israelis and Palestinians on the role of film and art in times of crisis. Here is his report. -
Alyssa Battistoni: Apocalypse Investors: How Wall Street Bets on Catastrophic Breakdowns That Destroy Lives
July 2011Bankers figure that if global markets collapse, they might as well make money out of it. -
Russ Baker: What Panetta Saw—And What We Got
July 2011How Leon Panetta’s recent trip to Afghanistan and Iran reveal nothing more than what a microphone in Washington would have. -
Tom Engelhardt: Obama’s Bush-League World: Is the Obama National Security Team a Pilotless Drone?
July 2011How George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror fantasies and delusions were embedded in our world and have now become the humdrum norm of Obama policy. -
Adele M. Stan: 4 Ways the Murdoch Scandal Points To Rot at the Top
July 2011Gag money, lies, political warfare, and conflicts of interest are all in a day’s work at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. -
Russ Baker: Two Million Dead—Now What’s That South Sudan Independence About?
July 2011We all like pageantry (Kate and William and all), but the South Sudan independence story shouldn’t bury the strategic angle. -
Joshua Holland: Mexicans No Longer Immigrating to U.S.? (What Will Xenophobes Freak Out About Now?)
July 2011A common perception that helps fuel hostility toward migrants is that there’s a never-ending pool of people dying to come here, but that’s just not true. -
Erica Wright: Sex, Lies, and Iambic Pentameter
July 2011The events in Measure for Measure prove we have not come far enough when a man’s word still counts for more than a woman’s and when an elected official can play by a different set of rules than the rest of us. -
Eric Benson: Further Reading After “Forgotten But Not Gone”
July 2011
What to read after Eric Benson’s pilgrimage in search of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges -
Barbara Ehrenreich: War Without Humans: Modern Blood Rites Revisited
July 2011War has been, and we still expect it to be, the most massive collective project human beings undertake. But it has been evolving quickly in a very different direction, one in which human beings have a much smaller role to play. -
Russ Baker and Spencer Mandel: Fact Wrestling: Ashton Kutcher v. Village Voice
July 2011When we count on celebrities to provide us with guidance on politics and news, we can easily be led astray. Here, we review a battle between Ashton Kutcher and a newspaper, and find Kutcher coming up short. -
Les Leopold: How Dracula Hedge Funds Are Sucking Us Dry
July 2011What notion of economics or ethics justifies the fact that it would take the average family more than 35,000 years to earn as much as the top hedge fund managers earn in one year? -
July 8, 2011—Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens For Legitimate Government
July 2011Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. -
Guernica’s Top 5 on Sudan
July 2011Tomorrow Republic of South Sudan celebrates its independence. Guernica counts down its top five reports on Sudan. -
Adele M. Stan: Murdoch Named PATRIOT Act Architect to Mop Up Paper’s Eavesdropping Scandal; News of the World to Close
July 2011One of Murdoch’s UK papers is in trouble over hacking private cell phones, including one belonging to a murder victim—and some familiar U.S. faces may be part of the coverup. -
Chase Mader: Bradley Manning, American Hero: Four Reasons Why Pfc. Bradley Manning Deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Not a Prison Cell
July 2011Is Secretary of Defense Robert Gates more deserving of the Presidential Medal of Honor than the young private who gave Americans a far fuller sense of what our government is actually doing abroad? -
Joshua Holland: Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore Using Dodgy Statistics to Fuel Child Sex Slavery Panic
July 2011Throwing wildly inflated numbers around doesn’t help young people avoid falling into the horrific world of prostitution. -
Sarah Jaffe: Car-Share: How to Keep Cars Off the Road and Even Break Our Destructive Consumption Habits
July 2011Innovative new car-sharing businesses are changing the way we think about driving—and owning cars. -
Lauren Kelley: Journalist’s Essay About Engaging in Violent Sex to Treat Her PTSD Stirs Controversy
July 2011Mac McClelland wrote for years from disaster zones. Last week she wrote from inside the experience of her own PTSD and how violent sex helped her cope. Now she faces both backlash and praise. -
Robin Yassin-Kassab: Outside/Inside
July 2011Arrests and beatings have escalated over the last week in Syria. People have been shot dead in the Damascus suburbs. And now the slaughter in Hama. -
Justin Alvarez: Everyone Gets Married!
July 2011You provide the marriage license. They provide the wedding. -
Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith: Why Unions Should Reconsider Support for Tar Sands Oil Pipeline
July 2011Presidents of several unions have come out in support of the Keystone XL oil pipeline. But the damage the pipeline will do far outweighs its benefits. -
Tara Lohan: Put Down Your Beach Towel: 10 States Where You Should Think Twice Before Jumping in the Water
July 2011If you’re planning to hit the beach this summer, here’s the scoop on which beaches have the worst water quality issues. -
Andy Kroll: What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Jobs: How Racism, Global Economics, and the New Jim Crow Fuel Black America’s Crippling Jobs Crisis
July 2011The job crisis we know nothing about should be the shame of the nation. -
Leah Berkenwald: When the FBI Captured Whitey Bulger, the Idealistic Crime Family Myth Finally Died
July 2011To South Boston, Whitey Bulger was more than a man. He was a tent post to the familiar. -
Russ Baker: “Coca-Cola Plant” Takes On A Whole New Meaning
July 2011Something good coming out of the World Wildelife Fund’s infamous chumminess with big corporations? Who knew? -
Spencer Mandel: Who Do They Think We Are, Oxymorons? A Look At “Humanitarian” War
July 2011Every U.S. intervention is sold as serving beneficent ends. However, there’s always another purpose—and the public is the last to learn the truth. -
July 1, 2011—Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens For Legitimate Government
July 2011Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. -
Tom Engelhardt: The Militarized Surrealism of Barack Obama: Signs of the Great American Unraveling
July 2011What President Obama’s words really tell us about the state of the nation. -
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd: Marriage Equality: Who’s Next?
July 2011It’s no longer just New Yorkers who are dancing for marriage equality. -
Sarah Jaffe: Supreme Court OK With Violent Video Games; Porn Still Illegal (for Minors)
July 2011Is it hypocritical of the Supreme Court to allow violent video games to be sold to minors, while continuing to ban depictions of sex? -
Russ Baker: Libya Update…Featuring Media and Congress as Daffy Duck
June 2011The why of the massive bombing of Libya continues to grow more nonsensical. Congress is baffled into paralysis, and our major media stick to the most honorable interpretation—despite evidence to the contrary. -
Rec Room: Claire Grossman: Asterios Polyp
June 2011
David Mazzucchelli’s gorgeous hardcover teaches us that sometimes a comic book is just a comic book. -
Joshua Holland: How the Hell Do You Get Out of Debt If You’re Not a CEO Raking in Millions?
June 2011Americans want to get out of debt, but the working majority are tapped out and having real problems making ends meet. -
Sarah Seltzer: Is The Voice A Progressive Alternative to American Idol?
June 2011The success singing competition The Voice achieved by positing itself as the anti-Idol suggests America is ready to privilege talent over appearance. -
Andrew J. Bacevich: On the Mend? America Comes to Its Senses
June 2011At periodic intervals, the American body politic has shown a marked susceptibility to messianic fevers. Whenever an especially acute attack occurs, a sort of delirium ensues, manifesting itself in delusions of grandeur and demented behavior. -
Cliff Schecter: How To Really Improve Our Nation’s Schools
June 2011Innovation should be about updating. Improving how we teach our children, not figuring out the best way to profit from it. Yes, change is necessary, no it doesn’t need to come in the form of some Randian version of public schooling. -
Joshua Holland: Why Are Conservatives Scared of Cameron Diaz?
June 2011“White Hispanics” are white people who trace their origins to Spain, and they’re the reason reports of America’s coming “white minority” status are 100-percent wrong. -
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd: How Hacker Activists Are Risking Jail for Everyone’s Right to Internet Freedom
June 2011Since WikiLeaks, authorities have been more aggressive about arresting citizen cyber activists. Yet new actions by the biggest “hacktivists” show they’re willing to risk it. -
Michael T. Klare: The New Thirty Years’ War: Winners and Losers in the Great Global Energy Struggle to Come
June 2011For giant oil companies like BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Royal Dutch Shell, an eventual shift away from petroleum will have massive economic consequences. -
Najla Said: An Open Letter to Shakira: We Are Not All Israel
June 2011
If only everything was like “Waka Waka,” but unfortunately not everything is as euphonious as a pop song. -
June 24, 2011—Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens For Legitimate Government
June 2011Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. -
Emily Johnson: SlutWalk Chicago: By Any Other Name?
June 2011
The essential point of this march is that people must be the subject and not the object in our own lives. -
Rafia Zakaria: A Modest Proposal for Reinventing the Burqa
June 2011A satirical suggestion that, under the shelter of the burqa, Pakistani women may discover bitter humor in despair. -
Tom Engelhardt: Nine War Words That Define Our World: “Victory” Is the Verbal Equivalent of a Yeti
June 2011Nine common terms associated with our present wars that probably don’t mean what you think they mean. -
Sarah-Jane Stratford: The Taming of the Screw
June 2011
Like the fines leveled against fornicators under the English feudal system, the GOP attack on Planned Parenthood is a way to keep poor women down. -
Jake Whitney: It Is Time to Stop Reporting on the Sex Lives of Politicians
June 2011Imagine if the public service of Eisenhower, JFK, and FDR were cut short by the media coverage of their indiscretions. Would we be better off if these men never became president? Of course not. -
Sarah Seltzer: Lessons to Secular Community from The Book of Mormon Musical: Take on Dogma With Humor
June 2011How is it possible that a play can convey a crippling blow to religious dogma and authority without alienating anyone except the most puritan and devout? -
Russ Baker: Is Aging Itself A Curable Disease? This Scientist Says Yes—Up To A Point
June 2011British aging researcher David Gems says the aging process can be hugely mitigated. He also recognizes that there are ethical dilemmas in further extending life. -
Sarah Jaffe: CEO of Walmart Makes in One Hour What the Average Employee Makes In a Year: How Skyrocketing Inequality Is Hurting America
June 2011A new report shows exactly who the top 0.1 percent of Americans with all the wealth are. The question is, what can we do about it? -
Jonathan Schell: Attacking Libya—and the Dictionary: If Americans Don’t Get Hurt, War Is No Longer War
June 2011In an attempt to explain away the powers invested in Congress, the Obama administration has launched a war on words. -
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd: Slavoj Žižek, Lady Gaga Bond Over Union Strike
June 2011Apparently intellectuals are like catnip to beautiful women. -
Michael Winship: Why Is It So Hard to Bring Rapists to Justice?
June 2011A new documentary about a real life Special Victims Unit shows how tough it is to make rapists pay for their crime. -
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd: Watchdogs, Outraged Over Rihanna’s New Video, Give Kanye’s Misogyny a Pass
June 2011The anger against “Man Down” is another tiresome example of a double standard. -
Joshua Holland: 9 Countries That Do It Better: Why Does Europe Take Better Care of Its People Than America?
June 2011The world’s wealthy democracies have somewhat different priorities, leading to some very different outcomes for their citizens. -
Claire Lambrecht: David Carr Versus the World
June 2011The subject of the new documentary Page One: Inside the New York Times makes you wonder how America has allowed itself to be sated on a diet of high-fructose Kardashian for so many seasons. -
June 17, 2011—Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens For Legitimate Government
June 2011Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. -
Joshua Holland: Corporate America Is Hoarding Tons of Cash: Why In the World Would Obama Think About Giving Them More Tax Cuts?
June 2011The White House is desperate to get any measure that might boost the economy past a dysfunctional Congress. -
Justin Alvarez: José Castrellón’s Priti Baiks
June 2011
The Panamanian photographer on his inspiration for the Priti Baiks series, Donald Trump, and the Kuna Indian’s love for heavy metal. -
Chip Ward: How the West Was Lost: The American West in Flames
June 2011The West is burning, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Even God told Noah this would happen. -
Stephen Gutwillig and Tommy McDonald: An Exit Strategy from America’s Longest War—40 Years of Disastrous Drug Prohibition
June 2011When will we abandon what is arguably the most disastrous public policy in American history since chattel slavery and the Jim Crow legacy? -
Amardeep Singh: Has Jhumpa Jumped the Shark?
June 2011
A response to Lahiri’s latest essay in the New Yorker -
Russ Baker: More Questions About The Libyan Sex Atrocity Reporting
June 2011The media’s fondness for stories with a sexual component might be leading to shoddy reporting. -
Michael Archer: Q&A with Alice Walker
June 2011
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author on her impending trip to Gaza, “SlutWalk,” and The Chicken Chronicles. -
Scott Thill: Ecstasy As Treatment for PTSD from Sexual Trauma and War? New Research Shows Very Promising Results
June 2011MDMA is gaining serious traction as a treatment option for soldiers and civilians suffering from crippling post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). -
Russ Baker: Did Qaddafi Really Order Mass Rapes? Or is the West Falling Victim to a Viagra-Strength Scam?
June 2011The story of Qaddafi's “mass rapes” might be too crazy to be true. -
Krystie Yandoli: The Mavs Snagged Their First Title. Now Can We Concentrate on Eliminating Homophobia in the NBA?
June 2011NBA season’s over. There’s no better time to examine how the spate of recent incidents speak to the larger macho culture of the sport. -
Robert Reich: The Swamp of Washington and the Morass of the Economy
June 2011There’s no way out of this mess without bold leadership from Washington to rekindle consumer demand. Americans are scared. With reason. -
Ari LeVaux: Is the USDA’s New Symbol of Dietary Correctness a Coup for the Dairy Industry?
June 2011While there’s some good news when it comes to fruit and vegetables, the new guidelines seem tailored to encourage maximum dairy industry profitability. -
Robert Reich: The Stalled Recovery, Smoke and Mirrors, and the Carnage on the Street
June 2011What happens when the real economy catches up with the financial economy? -
Marian Wang and Sergio Hernandez: A Reader’s Guide to Thousands of Sarah Palin’s Released Emails
June 2011What to expect from 24,199 paper pages of emails from when Sarah Palin was governor of Alaska. -
Jessica Mack: Teens Locked Up and Forced to Give Birth to Kids Sold into Slavery—How Can This Happen, and What Can We Do About It?
June 2011Last week, BBC broke the story of what has been dubbed a “baby farm” in southern Nigeria. Now that we know this, what are we going to do about it? -
June 10, 2011—Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens For Legitimate Government
June 2011Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. -
Justin Alvarez: David Simon Counter Offers Eric Holder’s Plea For The Wire’s Return
June 2011What Simon thinks of the Department of Justice’s prosecution of our misguided, destructive and dehumanizing drug prohibition. -
Anne Fernald: Rape, Revisited
June 2011
How different was it to be raped by a suitor in 1747 than today? -
Sam Kerbel: On Cultism and Ascending to Valhalla: The Media’s Reaction to the Abramson Appointment
June 2011The Wall Street Journal and Commentary’s condescending remarks about the first female editor of the New York Times reveal an underlying sexism. -
Diana Abu-Jaber: Race, Food, and Cultivating Selective Deafness
June 2011
A Guernica fiction writer on how the search became more important than the homeland. -
Rec Room: Matt Petronzio: Anna Rabinowitz’s Present Tense
June 2011Poetry that asks, “Why did we allow things to get to where they are today?” -
Tom Engehardt: 100 Percent Scared
June 2011The rabble over the E. coli outbreak and terrorism teaches us a lot about how America works. -
Arwa Aburawa: Saving Egypt
June 2011Conservationist Mindy Baha El Din about the rise of the environmental movement in post-revolution Egypt, tourism and the challenges ahead. -
Russ Baker: Born Again—And Brain Damage
June 2011How George W. Bush may have been making a political calculation when he declared himself “Born Again.” -
Rania Khalek: 5 WikiLeaks Hits of 2011 That Are Turning the World on Its Head—And That the Media Are Ignoring
June 2011Is 2011 capable of exceeding 2010’s revelations? And what discoveries in 2011 has WikiLeaks unearthed thus far? -
Alia Yunis: Further Reading After “Girls on Ice”
June 2011
What to read after Alia Yunis’s story of a girl dealing with her sister’s unexpected death. -
Robert Reich: Jamie Dimon’s Bizarre Idea About Why The Recovery Has Stalled
June 2011Someone should remind Jamie Dimon that a few years ago he and his colleagues on the Street almost eviscerated the American economy. -
Bethlehem Shoals: Hockeyhell: The NHL’s LGBT Wars, and What Happens When Pro Athletes Make Progressive Statements
June 2011Professional athletes are increasingly expressing their staunch political beliefs, from left to right. How do we distinguish when politics are simply commerce? -
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd: Why Progressives Should be Mad at Anthony Weiner
June 2011Having cyber-infidelities may be a privacy issue, but by lying about his sexy TwitPics, Rep. Anthony Weiner may have put important progressive issues at risk. -
Joshua Holland: 9 Signs That We May Be Living Through Another Depression
June 2011Three in 10 Americans say we’re living through another depression—are they right? -
Casson Trenor: 4 Lame Excuses for Shark Finning and Why it Must End
June 2011The act of shark finning flies directly in the face of sustainable living. We need to outgrow this practice and embrace a positive relationship with sharks. -
Peter Van Buren: Occupying Iraq, State Department-Style: A Frat House With Guns in Baghdad
June 2011Even if the troops do finally leave, the question is: Will that actually bring the U.S. occupation of Iraq to a close? -
Robert Reich: Why Washington Isn’t Doing Squat About Jobs and Wages
June 2011Washington doesn’t want to admit the economy recovery has stalled, so it’s time for the unemployed to speak up. -
Sarah Jaffe: Is Your Mobile Phone Transmitting Your Private Information to Corporations?
June 2011Our mobile phones and computers are storing and sharing more and more personal information—but do we have control over who sees it? -
Russ Baker: A Moment to Seize With Israel
June 2011While some criticize Meir Dagan for recent comments on Israel, what we should really be asking is why this doesn’t happen more often. -
Robert Reich: Back Toward Double Dip
June 2011Will the stalling economy finally wake Washington up from the games being played over the debt ceiling? -
Rebecca Bates: A File Sharing Program That Proves the Cliché
June 2011What we discover when we sift through digital refuse. -
Michael T. Klare: The Global Energy Crisis Deepens: Three Energy Developments That Are Changing Your Life
June 2011If we don’t abandon a belief that unrestricted growth is our inalienable birthright the future is likely to prove grim indeed. -
Elon Green: The 10 Greatest Villains of the AIDS Epidemic
June 2011The history of the AIDS epidemic is littered with people who, through malice or cowardice, made an unimaginably awful situation even worse. -
Molly O’Toole: Major International Leaders Plead for the U.S. and the World to Get Smart and Stop the War on Drugs
June 2011The Commission on Drug Policy urged a shift from incarceration to consideration of a full range of alternatives, from decriminalization to legalization and regulation. -
GuernicaWatch: What to View This Weekend on Netflix
June 2011Films to keep you occupied and out of the sun. -
June 3, 2011—Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens For Legitimate Government
June 2011Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. -
Diana Abu-Jaber: Further Reading After “The Oracle”
June 2011
What to read after Abu-Jaber’s tale of a conflicted fat kid. -
Bill McKibben: Three Strikes and You’re Hot: Time for Obama to Say No to the Fossil Fuel Wish List
June 2011We now inhabit an all-new, far less hospitable, far more rugged planet of our own making. -
Russ Baker: Cell Phones, Cancer, And You
June 2011This week’s big news—that cell phones cause cancer—isn’t new to anyone who’s been paying attention for the past 16 months. -
Chuck Collins: How Apple Avoids Paying Its Fair Share
June 2011Apple looks downright patriotic next to master tax dodgers like General Electric and Boeing, but it still pays far less than it should. -
Sarah Jaffe: Congress’s Culture of Wealth: How Insider Information Enriches Members of the House
June 2011A new study reports that members of the House saw their investments outperform those of the average investor by 6 percent annually. -
Rania Khalek: America’s Creeping Police State
June 2011Imperialism abroad is destroying what is left of our democracy at home. From warrantless wiretapping to warrantless door-busting, this is what a police state looks like. -
Sarah Jaffe: The Next Bubble Is About to Burst: College Grads Face Dwindling Jobs and Mounting Loans
June 2011Today’s graduates face miserable job prospects, and experts say the student loan crisis could be worse than the credit card or housing bubbles. -
Robert Reich: The Truth About the American Economy
June 2011Robert Reich traces the history of the economy, from Depression to prosperity and now to stagnation. -
Anna Clark: How I Went to Kenya, and Had to Re-Learn How to Be an Environmentalist
June 2011Adapting to life in Kenya means adapting to an environment where it is harder to be a good environmentalist. -
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd: 8 Comic Book Heroes That Spread Progressive Ideals
June 2011Quintessential patriot Superman renounced his U.S. citizenship last month in protest. But he’s not the first comic-book hero to espouse progressive ideals. -
Joshua Holland: Stop the Granny Bashing: Despite What You May Think, Our Seniors Are in Trouble
June 2011We must fight the deficit hysterics’ relentless granny-bashing. Most people don’t grasp that this group has already been hit hard by budget cuts and the recession. -
Joshua Holland: Five Eye-Opening Facts About Our Bloated Post-9/11 “Defense” Spending
May 2011A dollar spent on guns is one less buck available for butter. -
Tom Engelhardt: Dumb Question of the Twenty-first Century: Is It Legal?: Post-Legal America and the National Security Complex
May 2011When it comes to acts of state today, there is only one law: don’t pull up the curtain. -
David Chura: Teaching in Tough Places
May 2011We need to pay homage to those who teach kids in the most difficult place of all: jail. -
Rafia Zakaria: Curse of the Bomb
May 2011The bomb that was supposed to deter and defeat has been unable to frighten anyone into leaving Pakistan alone. -
May 27, 2011—Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens For Legitimate Government
May 2011Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. -
Amanda Marcotte: When Will Republicans Stop Saying Dumb Things About Rape? (Hint: When They Stop Hating Women)
May 2011Glib comments about rape by anti-choice Republican lawmakers reveal that the anti-choice movement is deeply rooted in antagonism to women’s rights. -
Russ Baker: With Prison, Try A Little Tenderness
May 2011Are studies like this, by serious researchers, always ignored, or do people ever pay attention and actually change their minds? -
Sarah Seltzer: Budget Cuts Most Likely to Affect Women: So Why Aren’t There Any Women on the Budget-Slashing Committee?
May 2011Women’s groups worry that the budget will be balanced on the backs of the most vulnerable. -
Jill Richardson: Factory Farms Produce 100 Times More Waste Than All People In the U.S. Combined and It’s Killing Our Drinking Water
May 2011“Factory farms are dangerous to the environment; they are ticking time bombs of manure just waiting to be spilled into public waters.” -
Robin Yassin-Kassab: Blundering and Adapting
May 2011Syria has only one option: immediate cessation of state terror and a staged transitional process, or else the regime pulls the country down with it as it goes. -
Dilip Hiro: Playing the China Card: Has the Obama Administration Miscalculated in Pakistan?
May 2011A striking assessment of why Pakistan isn’t slated to lose any future showdown with the Obama administration. -
Scott Thill: Employment Rockets! In the Unpaid Internship Sector
May 2011The United States still counts a depressing 24 million unemployed, while the number of exploited unpaid workers keeps growing. -
Christopher Hitchens: Refutations from a Stalinist Commissar-Lookalike
May 2011
This response to a response to a response to a response takes George Scialabba and Noam Chomsky to task for seemingly hasty analogies and false accusations. -
Russ Baker: Trump is Not the Carnival Slideshow—The Political “Normal” Is
May 2011The media accuses candidates like Trump and Palin of making the elections into a “circus,” but the real problems are the candidates who seem more legitimate. -
Alyssa Battistoni: Are Well-Off Progressives Standing in the Way of a Real Movement for Economic Justice?
May 2011Many progressives are affluent and well-educated. Does their elite status stand in the way of a movement to fight attacks on the working class? -
Rebecca Solnit: Worlds Collide in a Luxury Suite: Some Thoughts on the IMF, Global Injustice, and a Stranger on a Train
May 2011A genuine class war is being fought openly in our time, and last week, a so-called socialist put himself on the wrong side of it. -
Ari LeVaux: Why The Lowly Little Sardine Should Be at the Top of Your Shopping List
May 2011Wild seafood is wrought with environmental, ethical, economic, and health implications. But the sardine poses a solution to each of these problems. -
Jake Whitney: Why Don’t You Profit When Pharmacies Sell Your Prescription Data?
May 2011When, exactly, did we agree to allow others—data-mining firms, pharmaceutical companies, and who knows who else—to access personal data and profit by its dissemination? -
Adele M. Stan: Accusing DSK of Sexual Assault Took Guts—But Union Protection Is Essential
May 2011A woman attacked by her employer’s very powerful customer was perhaps empowered to come forward knowing her union contract meant she wouldn’t lose her job for it. -
May 20, 2011—Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens For Legitimate Government
May 2011Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. -
Nomi Prins: Dominique Strauss-Kahn Sits in Prison While the IMF Keeps Ravaging Entire Economies Every Day
May 2011The IMF can do far more damage trashing global economic well-being than the man behind the sex abuse scandal. -
Tom Engelhardt: Bored to Death in Afghanistan (and Washington): Mating Déjà Vu with a Mobius Strip in the Graveyard of Empire
May 2011If nobody told you otherwise, you could easily believe that almost every breaking Afghan story in the last four weeks came from some previous year of the war. -
Ada Limón: Talk Derby to Me: Luck and the Longshot
May 2011
Both poetry and horse racing still give us a ticket to ride, a little bit of chance in our pockets. A little rally, rally, rally. -
Russ Baker: Quick, Quick: Why Are We in Libya? A New Candor Prevails…Sort Of
May 2011The writer dissects the New York Times and asks, “what was Britain’s particular reason for focusing on Qaddafi, as opposed to any other run-of-the-mill murderous thug in these general parts?” -
Andrew Zawacki: On Slovenia, Antitranslation, and “One-night Stand” Poems
May 2011
What is it like on both sides of the translator-poet equation? -
Jonathan Cook: Is Israel at a Strategic Dead End as Palestinian “Arab Spring” Arrives?
May 2011The Palestinian “Arab Spring” is arriving and Israel has no political strategy to deal with it. Instead, Israel used the only weapon in its current arsenal—brute force. -
Nick Turse: Obama’s Reset: Arab Spring or Same Old Thing?: How the President and the Pentagon Prop Up Both Middle Eastern Despots and American Arms Dealers
May 2011The Pentagon is leaning ever more heavily on rich rulers in the Arab world to prop up the military-corporate complex at home. -
Rob Boston: 10 Great Things About America That Drive Conservatives and the Religious Right Insane
May 2011Religious Right groups and their allies in the Tea Party claim to respect American values, but much would change if they had their way. -
Himanshu Suri: Post-9/11 All Over Again: The Hate-Mongers Who Bombarded the Internet After Osama bin Laden’s Death
May 2011The Das Racist rapper reflects on 9/11 and how racism against Middle Eastern and South Asian people in America is still as alive as ever. -
Russ Baker: Renewing Our Views, Japanese Style
May 2011Japan has committed to building an entirely new, less nuclear-reliant energy policy. Maybe we should consider doing the same. -
Paul Armentano: The 5 Worst States to Get Busted With Pot In
May 2011Even a minor pot bust can be life-altering for people unlucky enough to be arrested in one of these five states. -
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd: Was Ellen Willis—Feminist, Activist, Genius—The Best Rock Critic of All Time?
May 2011A new anthology of the New Yorker’s first-ever pop music columnist helps rescue her writing from obscurity. -
Peter Van Buren: The War Lovers: Why It Feels So Good to Be Embedded with the U.S. Military
May 2011War pornographers can’t offer us an objective look at a world in which more and more foreigners only run into Americans when they are wearing green and carrying weapons. -
May 13, 2011—Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens For Legitimate Government
May 2011Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. -
William J. Astore: The Crash and Burn of Old Regimes: Washington Court Culture and Its Endless Wars
May 2011Our wars and their impact are kept in remarkable isolation from what passes for public affairs in this country, leaving most Americans with little say about whether they should be, and how they are, waged. -
Sarah Seltzer: Sluts Don’t Cause Rape, Rapists Do: Why “Slutwalks” Are Sweeping the World
May 2011The idea behind the Slutwalks is simple, yet so often fails to get through: rape is rape, no matter what the victim wears, says or does. -
Joshua Holland: Was the Killing of Osama bin Laden Legal?
May 2011We don’t know whether the administration ordered the al Qaeda leader killed, but that hasn’t stopped an acrimonious debate. -
Les Leopold: 7 Ways Hedge Funds Lie, Cheat, and Steal
May 2011The billionaire head of the Galleon hedge fund was found guilty of 14 counts of securities fraud and conspiracy, but he’s not just an isolated “bad apple.” -
Maura R. O’Connor: Afghanistan Base Life: A Vicious Groundhog Day
May 2011
The tempo of base life is strange. It swings from extreme boredom to high stress, day after day after day. -
Russ Baker: 100 Percent Renewable Energy Laughable? Would 80 Percent Float Your Boat?
May 2011The bottom line: visibility is crucial—if action is to follow. This is why we cannot depend on “old media” any more than on “old energy.” -
George Scialabba: Hitchens Distorts Noam Chomsky
May 2011George Scialabba on how “panting polemicist” Christopher Hitchens’s remarks against Noam Chomsky are evidence of a widespread and troubling failure among intellectuals. -
Joel Whitney: Indian Farmers & Suicide, a New Report
May 2011
Every thirty minutes a farmer in India commits suicide, according to a new report. Last June, Guernica looked at why. -
David Rosen: Salons: A New Intellectual Culture is Taking Shape Throughout the Country
May 2011Amidst the long, drawn-out recovery from the Great Recession, an unprecedented flowering of intellectual life is underway. -
Robert Reich: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Mitt
May 2011Robert Reich on Mitt Romney, the political chameleon that says nothing in a crowd-pleasing way. -
Robert Lipsyte: Millionaires v. Billionaires or Them v. Us?: Why the NFL Would Do Us a Favor By Calling Off the Coming Season
May 2011
How a labor dispute in the National Football League tells us everything we need to know about America. -
Russ Baker: Osama, The Future, and the Power of Nightmares
May 2011What we almost never see discussed is the bottom line. What is the long-term nature of the Islamic fundamentalist threat, or the nature of the worldview and grievances behind it? -
Bethlehem Shoals: Why Do Progressive Athletes Still Get All the Crap for Speaking Out?
May 2011Longtime Celtic and outspoken political firebrand Bill Russell is being honored with a statue, but professional sports still have a long way to progress politically. -
Joshua Holland: Thanks to Decades of Conservative Spin, Americans Are Hopelessly Confused About Taxes, Spending and the Deficit
May 2011Conservatives have spent 30 years divorcing the taxes we pay from the services they finance—no wonder the public doesn't know where their tax dollars go. -
Andy Kroll: How the McEconomy Bombed the American Worker: The Hollowing Out of the Middle Class
May 2011Will this warped recovery of ours pave the way for an even more warped economy, with the have-nots at one end, the have-it-alls at the other end, and increasingly less of us in between? -
Steven Wishnia: What’s Up With Obama’s Cynical Approach to Medical Marijuana?
May 2011The previous ten presidents were staunch prohibitionists. Meanwhile, Obama has taken the federal hand off the scale quite a bit. -
Robert Reich: Why Washington Should Listen to the Economy Here and Now
May 2011As the economy slows and we head toward recession, Washington needs to increase public spending, not fight over how to cut. -
Noam Chomsky: My Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death
May 2011We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. -
Joshua Holland: Did Osama bin Laden Win the “War on Terror”?
May 2011Perhaps we should stop cheering for our “success.” -
Guernica Essay “Lucky Girl” Chosen for Best American Essays 2011
May 2011From the stark lines that close its opening paragraph: “I used the pink foam. My period was late,” senior editor Katherine Dykstra knew “Lucky Girl” was perfect for Guernica. -
Mike Elk: Major Union Victory for Rite Aid Workers Offers Roadmap for Labor Movement
May 2011Workers get affordable health care, protections against outsourcing, and wage increases—a success model in a very tough environment for unionization. -
May 6, 2011—Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens For Legitimate Government
May 2011Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. -
Tom Engelhardt: Osama bin Laden’s American Legacy: It’s Time to Stop Celebrating and Go Back to Kansas
May 2011When the celebrations and partying over his death fade…we’ll once again be left with the tattered American world bin Laden willed us, and it will be easy to see just how paltry a thing this “victory,” his killing, is almost 10 years later. -
Russ Baker: 12 Questions about bin Laden
May 2011Do we, after all of the years of lying, all of a sudden accept whatever the government says as true? -
Les Leopold: How Wall Street and the Toxic Philosophy of Ayn Rand Are Destroying Our Retirements
May 2011Washington is talking about balancing the budget on the backs of the elderly, but the economic security they enjoyed at one time is already imperiled. -
Short Film: Roshini Thinakaran: Hunting for Oil
May 2011
In the debut episode of Journey OnEarth, a series about communities affected by pollution, we look at the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon disaster through the eyes of the people trying to understand the impact of the spill. -
Jill Richardson: Why Is Damning New Evidence About Monsanto's Most Widely Used Herbicide Being Silenced?
May 2011It turns out that Monsanto's Roundup herbicide might not be nearly as safe as people have thought, but the media is staying mum on the revelation. -
Adam Hochschild: Where Have All the Graveyards Gone?: The War That Didn’t End War and Its Unending Successors
May 2011What if, from the beginning, everyone killed in the Iraq and Afghan wars had been buried in a single large cemetery easily accessible to the American public? Would it bring the fighting to a halt more quickly? -
Rae Abileah: The U.S. Needs to Focus on Not Creating Any More bin Ladens
May 2011American Muslim Voice founder Samina Sundas on her reactions to the killing of Osama bin Laden. -
Adele M. Stan: Bin Laden’s Death: Triumph or Tumult Ahead?
May 2011The killing of Bin Laden will win Obama kudos at home, but will it further destabilize Pakistan? -
Joshua Holland: Bin Laden’s Killing Shows the Utter Folly of our “War on Terror”
May 2011The best outcome of bin Laden’s death would be for us to declare victory in the “war on terror” and bring the troops home. -
Phyllis Bennis: The Killing of Bin Laden: Justice or Vengeance?
May 2011Does the killing of al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden represent ultimate justice, or even an end to the “unfinished business” of 9/11? -
Tom Engelhardt: China as Number One?: Don’t Bet Your Bottom Dollar
May 2011Is it really so illogical to imagine China as the next “sole superpower” on planet Earth? -
Anneli Rufus: Meet Bart Ehrman: A One-Man God Fraud Squad
May 2011A world-renowned Bible scholar says the Bible is full of fibs, forgeries and downright lies. -
Chauncey DeVega: 10 Ways That the Birthers Are an Object Lesson in White Privilege
May 2011In an era of racism without racists, the Tea Party GOP Birther brigands provide one more lesson in the permanence of the social evil known as White privilege. -
Bill McKibben: Texas GOP Fights Catastrophic Wildfires With Prayer and Global Warming Denial
April 2011Praying for rain will be little help while Texas politicians work to deny global warming and prevent the changes that might actually deal with their troubles. -
Sarah Seltzer: Three Videos that Show Why Birtherism is Racist
April 2011Commentary from Rachel Maddow, Baratunde, and Ed Schultz on Obama’s newly released birth certificate, and the continuing birther controversy. -
Joshua Holland: 5 Fun Facts About the Fight Over the Debt Ceiling
April 2011That lawmakers who receive a paycheck to govern this country are threatening to bring about economic catastrophe shows that our discourse is approaching Peak Crazy. -
Robert Reich: The Wageless Recovery
April 2011Corporate profits for the first quarter of the year are way up. That’s largely because corporate payrolls are down. -
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd: Should Well-Meaning Celebs Like Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore Think Twice Before Diving Into Complex Social Issues?
April 2011Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore’s recent campaign against sex slavery is well-intentioned, but convoluted. Should half-serious celebrities just keep away from causes altogether? -
Ellen Friedrichs: Why Get Married? More and More Couples Choose to Have Kids Out of Wedlock
April 2011In America, once you have kids, not being married still isn't the norm—but is that finally changing? -
Shahin and Juan Cole: An Arab Spring for Women
April 2011Shahin and Juan Cole take up the role of women in the Arab Spring uprisings, not in a single place but across the region. -
Jess Row on the Fetishization of Elite Schools
April 2011
The author of “Dear Yale” talks about why cultivating a college’s image as a brand is sad, pathological, and anti-democratic. -
Robert Reich: Beware the “Middle Ground” of the Great Budget Debate
April 2011If Americans knew what we were really getting with each side of the budget debate, they wouldn't be so quick to advocate moving to the center. -
Dana Crum: 7 Poems That Shook the World
April 2011From Allen Ginsberg to Adrienne Rich, these poems invoked controversy and shifted our political consciousness. -
Alfred W. McCoy and Brett Reilly: Washington on the Rocks: An Empire of Autocrats, Aristocrats, and Uniformed Thugs Begins to Totter
April 2011For more than 50 years, Washington has been served well by a system of global power based on subordinate elites. Now those loyal allies look like an empire of failed states. -
Steven Wishnia: Inside America’s Almost-Legal Marijuana Industry
April 2011Author Trish Regan shares her insights on the clean-cut MBAs pursuing the “American Dream” through cannabis entrepreneurship. -
Jordan Elgrably: Colonialism, Christians, and Refugees: Incendies Searches for a Past in a Country Wracked by Civil War
April 2011Rarely has a story about modern war and civil strife so powerfully traversed generations and continents as this adaptation of Wajdi Mouawad’s play. -
David Rosen: Prostitutes as Victims of Throwaway Capitalism
April 2011Why, with all the deaths, beatings and suffering that prostitutes endure under “free market” conditions, is it not a regulated enterprise? -
Noam Chomsky: Is the World Too Big to Fail?: The Contours of Global Order
April 2011“As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.” -
Tyson Slocum: Why the BP Disaster in the Gulf Could Happen Again Tomorrow
April 2011Our response to last year’s disaster is the equivalent of rearranging chairs on the deck of the Titanic. -
Tom Engelhardt: Sleepwalking into the Imperial Dark: What It Feels Like When a Superpower Runs Off the Tracks
April 2011Empires live vampirically by feeding off others until, sooner or later, they begin to feed on themselves, to suck their own blood, to hollow themselves out. -
Sarah Seltzer: Recent Yale Male Behavior So Sexist the Federal Government Has to Intervene
April 2011The investigation of Yale shows the government may actually be taking sexual assault on campus seriously. -
Brad Reed: Yes, the Latest Right-Wing Paean to Sociopath Ayn Rand Is Really, Really Awful
April 2011“Take Lisa Simpson and combine her with Gordon Gekko and the obnoxious child-android from ‘Small Wonder,’ and you get the perfect Rand hero.” -
Alexis Madrigal: Further Reading Recommendations from a Guernica Writer
April 2011Guernica feature writer Alexis Madrigal provides further reading recommendations for reminding us that nature always has the last word. -
Letters to the Editor: Irish-Language Lit as a Curio?
April 2011A reader of Irish-language literature responds to Amit Chaudhuri’s claim that Gaelic and Welsh failed to become “viable literatures.” -
Ira Chernus: Three Myths of Israel’s Insecurity: And Why They Must Be Debunked
April 2011
What if every solemn reference to Israel’s “security needs” were greeted not with nodding heads, but with the eye-rolling skepticism it deserves? -
Alice Pung: Executing History
April 2011
As part of the University of Iowa project on travel writing, Alice Pung recalls (not) visiting a death prison in Cambodia. -
Re-Imagining Palestine in a Changing Arab Region: A Conversation Between Norman Finkelstein and Raja Shehadeh
April 2011
Guernica and OR Books present a conversation between political scientist Norman Finkelstein and Palestinian writer and lawyer Raja Shehadeh at Alwan for the Arts, 8 p.m., April 19th. -
Gara LaMarche: Zero-Tolerance Education Policies are Destroying Young People's Lives
April 2011All too often, the debate about school reform has wrongly emphasized pushing troubled children out of school, rather than making systemic improvements. -
Joshua Holland: Tax Day Question: Who’s Paying What?
April 2011Happy Tax Day. Remember that while your taxes are lower than in other advanced countries, they don’t get you free or very low-cost health-care, deeply subsidized university tuition, or 21st century infrastructure! -
Laura McCullough: Reading Recommendations from a Guernica Poet
April 2011The author of “Molecularity” warns us that “a hungry accident is about to happen” and suggests a few things to read in the meantime. -
Rafia Zakaria: The Sacred, the Noble, and the Cruel
April 2011Was it merely a confluence of chance or circumstance that UN aid workers, from Norway, Sweden, and Romania, would pay for the Pastor Terry Jones’s incendiary acts? -
Russ Baker: Getting Real on Budgets—And Who Won’t Budge
April 2011If you are one of the lucky ones who has been blessed, fairly or not, with the benefits this country, its people, and its economy can bestow, you might well ask: What have I done in return? -
Courtney E. Martin: Escaping the Sex Trafficking Industry
April 2011A Q&A with a former sex worker, who weaves her own painful story of being lured into “the life,” with the stories of the girls and women that she now helps. -
Brendan Kiely: A Question of Belief
April 2011
The problem with Bill Donohue’s full-page ad in the New York Times is that it attacks groups of people under the name of faith in the face of equity. -
Benedict Rogers: Is It a Crime to Write a Book?
April 2011“If my book is a problem, I asked, ‘why did you give me a visa?’ He looked at me. ‘We are also asking that question.’” -
Robin Yassin-Kassab: Two Syrians
April 2011The regime in Syria will not change by violence and extremism. If anything it will continue to be endorsed and will become more powerful. It is a lost battle, but it could be a long one. -
Andrew J. Bacevich: Not Why, But How: To the Shores of (and Skies Above) Tripoli
April 2011The question demands to be asked: Are we winning yet? And if not, why persist in an effort for which great pain is repaid with such little gain? -
Jamie Goldenberg: Plane Gazing
April 2011
Josef Hoflehner’s ‘Jet Airliner’ photographs beg the question, just how healthy is our relationship to flight? -
Simon Greer and Mik Moore: Three Ways Responsible Citizens Helped Get Glenn Beck Off the Air at Fox News
April 2011Fox News and Glenn Beck want the world to believe that all the people who spoke out against him had no impact on this decision. Don't buy it. -
Ada Limón: Why Poetry Helps
April 2011Poetry is, at once, fueling its own come back, and dying in the back alley of all things that don’t matter? So which one is it? Dying or living? Or, is it like us humans, doing both at the same time. -
Arun Gupta: The American Dream as We Know It is Dead
April 2011Why progressives need to think beyond the mantra of creating a “middle class America.” -
Sheila K. Johnson: The Blowback World of Chalmers Johnson: Remembering the Man and His Work
April 2011As his life slowly ebbed, Chal would sometimes exclaim in great agitation, “I don’t know what to do.” I always replied, “You don’t have to do anything, you’ve done enough.” -
Glenn Greenwald on WikiLeaks & Establishment Media
April 2011Since the technology to reveal government secrets won’t go away, no matter what is done to WikiLeaks, the government wants to make you afraid you’ll end up like Bradley Manning if you blow the whistle. So said Greenwald at the National Conference for Media Reform in Boston on Friday. -
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd: Screw the Royal Wedding: 6 Reasons Pomp and Circumstance Are Bad for America and Britain
April 2011While the media goes crazy over the union between Kate and William, here are some more tangible reasons the royal wedding should make you insane. -
Ellen Cantarow: Energy Is Ugly: Tar Sands Make Their Mark
April 2011Canada is the leading oil-supplier of the United States. Let me repeat that: the U.S. imports more oil from Canada than (yes) Mexico, which ranks second, and (believe it or not) Saudi Arabia, which ranks only third. -
Justin Alvarez: “Love the Future!”
April 2011As Ai Weiwei’s whereabouts are still unknown, netizens have taken it upon themselves to spread his message. -
Robert Reich: Paul Ryan’s Plan, the Coming Shutdown, and What’s Really at Stake
April 2011We are the richest nation in the world, richer than we’ve ever been. We can afford to remain a society whose members are in it together. -
Robert Reich: Why We Must Raise Taxes on the Rich
April 2011Today’s working and middle-class taxpayers are shelling out a bigger chunk of income in payroll taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes than thirty years ago. It’s just the opposite for super rich. -
John Patrick Leary: Can’t Forget the People of the Motor City
April 2011“The global media and many visiting photographers see Detroit as an abandoned and dead city…What is constantly absent from these soulless images are the people.” -
Les Leopold: Why Is Obama’s Treasury Dept. Perversely Siding With Big Banks Against Elizabeth Warren and the State AGs?
April 2011Warren and the AGs are demanding that the banks pay for the damage they have done AND create jobs. How refreshing! -
Video: Joshua Holland Talks to Laura Flanders About Republican Hostage-Taking on GritTV
April 2011“It’s not that we don’t want you to have these things,” conservatives say, “It’s just that they’ll ruin the economy and bring about widespread catastrophe.“ -
Russ Baker: Should “Frack” Be A Curse Word? A Look At the Hottest New Energy “Solution”
April 2011Don’t expect to take your tap water for granted ever again. -
Lewis Lapham: The Servant Problem: In Search of the Lost Battalion of America’s Unemployed
April 2011For how else could the American leaves of grass join their top-dressed companions on a golf course unless they borrowed money? -
Joshua Frank: Why Climate Activist George Monbiot Has Gone Nuclear—And Why He’s Wrong
April 2011“As a result of the disaster at Fukushima,” wrote Monbiot, “I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology.” Here’s why he’s made a big blunder. -
April 5, 2011— Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens For Legitimate Government
April 2011Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. -
Juan Cole: Defections, U.S. Withdrawal Point to Political Solution in Libya
April 2011It is better that the intervention in Libya not be branded a U.S. one, but rather be seen as the effort of the 28 nations of NATO plus the Arab League. It is true that the U.S. is a big part of NATO, but it doesn’t have to be a big part of the air war. -
Robin Yassin-Kassab: Dinosaur In Denial
April 2011If Arabs elsewhere could insist on their dignity, why should Syrians continue to put up with the regime’s casual barbarity? -
Nafissa Assed: Bad Luck, Worse Luck, Concrete Steps
April 2011
“We all know that the western intervention in Libya is problematic, but it also remains the right decision.” -
Nafeesa Syeed: Kashmiri Youth Take Up Arts Amid Conflict
April 2011According to Mercy Corps, some 66 percent of the Kashmir valley’s population is under 30 years old. Those youth who have come of age during turmoil are finding new ways to speak out. -
Andy Kroll: Return to Wisconsin: The Beginning or the End?
April 2011Who knows if Wisconsin wasn’t the beginning of the end, but the beginning of something new? -
B.E. Wilson: Mike Huckabee Says He Wants Americans To Be Indoctrinated At Gunpoint
April 2011Did Mike Huckabee just flush his presidential aspirations down the proverbial toilet? -
Video: Mary C. Matthews: March For Communities and Jobs
March 2011
Hundreds of thousands of protesters, workers, and union supporters march through downtown Los Angeles in opposition of the nation-wide attack on union rights and the American worker. -
Robert Reich: The Truth About the Economy: We’re Heading Back Toward a Double Dip
March 2011Watch out. The economy is slowing ominously, and the booster rockets are disappearing. -
Mark Dowie: On the Fly Podcast: Peter Gleick On the Impact of Our Bottled Water Obsession
March 2011This week, Dowie and his guest address the rising popularity of bottled water and how this practice has changed our environment. -
Angela Chen: Republican Party Responds to Professor’s Criticism by Trying to Get Hold of His Emails
March 2011
The Wisconsin Republican Party wants copies of Professor William Cronon's emails. His crime? He wrote them an open letter that wasn’t wholly congratulatory. -
Justin Alvarez: The Art of Getting From Point A to Point B
March 2011Nathan Wissell wants Cincinnati to understand its own transit system. A good map can do the trick. -
Bill McKibben: Why the Chamber of Commerce Has Been Wrong on All the Issues—For 99 Years and Counting
March 2011Though the Chamber claims to represent all of American business, their constituency is really that handful of huge dinosaur companies that would rather lobby than adapt. -
Karen J. Greenberg: America’s Growing Intolerance: How “Enemy Creep” Is Guantanamo-izing America
March 2011Just in case you thought that “political correctness” had been thoroughly discredited in the culture wars of the 1990s, it’s back—and this time it’s being treated as a stalking horse for terrorism. -
Sam Kerbel: Rec Room: Bruno Schulz
March 2011Frightening at times, uplifting at others, the liminal, dreamlike spaces of Bruno Schulz’s fiction are rare amongst even our most imaginative artists. -
Frances Kissling: Gerry Ferraro’s Other Legacy: How a Good Catholic Girl From Queens Took On Her Church
March 2011[Geraldine Ferraro] was not just the first Catholic woman to run for Vice President on a major party ticket. She was the woman who ended the control Catholic bishops had on the Democratic Party. It’s up to us to ensure that her story is told in all its fullness for generations to come. -
Robin Yassin-Kassab: Syrian Bloodbath
March 2011This is not a moment of hope but the start of a period of great division between Syrians, a period of blood and fear in which Syria’s vital regional role will be problematized. -
Jake Whitney: Libya is Just
March 2011While it is nearly impossible to justify killing, all evidence suggests that more people will die if the United States doesn’t intervene. So as long as this campaign—this war—is fought to help the Libyan people, and not to advance U.S. interests, it is a just one. -
Dan DiMaggio: Six Fired After Demanding Sick Days for Fast-Food Workers
March 2011After publicly demanding paid sick days, organized workers at the fast-food sandwich chain were fired. -
Kamel Daoud: Meursault
March 2011Algeria’s predicament is a massive displacement of the population toward an absolute and irreversible Elsewhere. -
Rebecca Solnit: Unpacking for a Disaster: What You Need to Survive the Unexpected
March 2011In the wake of its present disaster, Japan may already be changing, and that may not be a bad thing. -
Jeremy Harding: Front Runner
March 2011Runners run, jumpers jump, boxers stay on their feet if they can. But Guernica’s interview with Sahrawi runner Salah Ameidan is a reminder that athletes can be a problem for regimes that don’t like the values they symbolize merely by being who they are. -
Joshua Holland: Eight Unemployed for Every Job Opening: What Are They Supposed to Do Once Their Benefits Run Out?
March 2011Is there any hope of help arriving for the “99ers”? -
Rebecca Bates: Pakistan’s Growing Blasphemy Fever
March 2011Recently in Karachi, the previously unheard of Movement for the Protection of the Invitation to Islam posted banners encouraging the murder of author Tehmina Durrani. -
Chip Ward: How the “Peaceful Atom” Became a Serial Killer: Nuclear Power Loses Its Alibi
March 2011You might think that a danger virulent enough to outlast human languages would be a danger to avoid, but the hubris of the nuclear establishment is equal to its willingness to deceive. -
Terrence McNally: Why We’ve Started Expecting More from Technology and Less from Each Other
March 2011Author Sherry Turkle on her new book arguing that relentless connection through technology leads to a new solitude. -
Robert Reich: Why Governor LePage Can’t Erase History, and Why We Need a Fighter in the White House
March 2011Pro-business goals are breaking out all over. House and Senate Republicans are intent on deregulating, privatizing, and cutting spending and taxes…But most Americans are still in desperate trouble. -
Rebecca Bates: The One Where Daniel Ellsberg Gets Arrested
March 2011The 79 year-old Guernica interviewee who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times was arrested at a rally for Bradley Manning. -
Robert Reich: The Republicans’ Big Lies About Jobs (And Why Obama Must Repudiate Them)
March 2011[N]othing is more central to average Americans than jobs and wages. Unless the President forcefully rebuts Republican’s big lies, they’ll soon become conventional wisdom. -
Robert Greenwald: First Day of Libya Strikes Cost More Than $100 Million—Is It Worth It?
March 2011Every time a Tomahawk cruise missile blows up a building in Libya (and everyone inside it), war-profiteer Raytheon makes $1.5 million. -
Anneli Rufus: Crime Rates Are Plummeting—And No One Knows Why
March 2011Could it be that America is actually turning less violent? Or are we as violent as ever, but have simply found different ways of assuaging our urges? -
Tom Engelhardt: The Worst That Could Happen
March 2011“And so, for decades, that part of my childhood remained the dark but largely forgotten underside of the golden 1950s. I never thought I'd want it back, but with six nuclear plants threatening to melt down in Fukushima, Japan, I find that I do.” -
Frederick Deknatel: Baghdad Chassis
March 2011
In London’s Imperial War Museum, two artifacts from Baghdad, 90 years apart in age, have become symbols of historic, imperial competition and the continued hubris of war, dressed up by “democracy.” -
Corey Hill: Urban Gardening and Green Economy Flourish in Detroit
March 2011The greater Detroit area is the nexus of an entire host of progressive enterprises, notable for both the diversity of its participants and the diversity of its projects. -
Anneli Rufus: Crime Rates Are Plummeting—And No One Knows Why
March 2011Could it be that America is actually turning less violent? Or are we as violent as ever—but have simply found less interpersonal means of assuaging our urges? -
Rebecca Solnit: The Butterfly and the Boiling Point: Charting the Wild Winds of Change in 2011
March 2011When a revolution is made, people suddenly find themselves in a changed state—of mind and of nation. The ordinary rules are suspended, and people become engaged with each other in new ways, and develop a new sense of power and possibility. -
Joshua Holland: Japan Nuclear Disaster Unprecedented—No Way to Know About U.S. Impact
March 2011Events taking place in the Fukushima No. 1 power plant are simply unprecedented and the situation appears to be deteriorating. -
Robin Yassin-Kassab: Infantile Leftism
March 2011If Libyans end up handing over economic control to the West, it will be the fault of the Libyans, not of the no-fly zone resolution. -
Brittany Shoot: Leaving Home in Search of the American Dream Only to be Forced to Turn Around and Go Back
March 2011At times heartbreaking, the memoir is also a comforting tale about the importance of family, making sense of shifting gender roles, and believing in others. -
Anonymous from Libya Revealed: Introducing Nafissa Assed
March 2011A correspondent in Tripoli renounces her anonymity after fleeing to Morocco. -
March 18, 2011—Breaking News and Commentary from Citizens For Legitimate Government
March 2011Breaking news from the multi-partisan activist group established to expose and resist U.S. imperialism, corpora-terrorism, and the New World Order. -
Jake Whitney: The Sad, Strange Sacking of Muhammad Yunus
March 2011Through Grameen Bank, Muhammad Yunus has made entrepreneurs of beggars and community leaders of the disregarded. The very least the Bangladeshi government can do in return is let him step down when he chooses. -
Suzanne Kamata: Postcard from Japan: Disability and Disaster
March 2011A mother in Japan, whose daughter is confined to a wheelchair, reflects on the difficulties of getting through natural disasters with a disability. -
Arun Gupta: Tsunamis and Nuke Disasters: How Human Arrogance Intensifies Suffering
March 2011The collision between natural hazards and human society and economy is what creates a disaster. -
Robert Reich: As the Global Economy Trembles, Our Nation’s Capital Fiddles
March 2011The U.S. economy is flirting with another dip, but nothing is being done because knaves and fools are in charge. -
Moshe Adler: Whose Side is the New York Times On?
March 2011
Declaring that it was neither anti-union nor anti-worker, the Times editorial page recently set out to assess whether New York’s state workers have been overpaid—and, lo and behold, they are. -
Justin Alvarez: Barry Hannah in the Oxford American
March 2011The March issue of the Oxford American is dedicated to the fierce Mississippi-bred writer and professor Barry Hannah, who died a little over a year ago on March 1, 2010. In a video shot by writer and friend John Oliver Hodges on his time spent as Hannah’s right-hand man, the two revisit some of Hannah’s old ghosts. -
Robin Yassin-Kassab: The U.S.-Saudi-Khalifa Alliance
March 2011“Following the surprise visit of U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates to Bahrain, home of the American Fifth Fleet, tanks and troops of the Saud family dictatorship have crossed the causeway and are now occupying Manama.” -
Erica Wright: Petition to Add “Dude Lit” to the Dictionary
March 2011The editors of the OED just have to add “dude lit” to their database and, in doing so, ensure an equal opportunity for insult. -
Medea Benjamin: Activists Stand Up for Bradley Manning and PJ Crowley
March 2011How outrageous that PJ Crowley was punished for simply telling the truth about Bradley Manning's imprisonment while the war criminals go free. -
Robin Yassin-Kassab: Terror and Hypocrisy
March 2011“These murders [in Itamar] were immoral and politically counter-productive. They gave Israel an excuse to whine about the bloodthirstiness of the natives and a pretext for building hundreds more homes in the West Bank.” -
Robert Reich: Why Obama Isn’t Fighting the Budget Battle
March 2011[M]any in the Obama White House have concluded that the president should follow Clinton’s campaign script… If it worked for Clinton, it must work for Obama—or so it’s supposed. -
Anne McClintock: Wisconsin: An Epochal Standoff
March 2011
“Whatever his short-term victory, Walker has overreached, igniting a nation-wide, populist, progressive labor movement that is long overdue, and that will have an epochal reach far beyond Wisconsin.” -
Norman Solomon: Nuclear Power Madness
March 2011With the nuclear meltdowns in japan, it’s up to us to peacefully and insistently shut our U.S. plants down. -
Mark Dowie: On the Fly Podcast: Peggy Orenstein Takes Aim at “Girly-Girl Culture”
March 2011This week Dowie and his guest talk social networking, gender identities, and breast health. -
Robin Yassin-Kassab: Should the No-Fly Zone Fly?
March 2011“The Libyan revolution risks drowning in blood. If it does, the larger Arab revolution may well grind to a temporary halt.” -
Joel Whitney: Mac McClelland’s Burma Refugee Diary
March 2011
As momentum builds for Security Council action, McClelland’s riveting debut shines a light on the characters behind the Karen refugee crisis, and reminds us of the need for more international attention on Burma. -
Guernica and Dzanc Books Announce Winners of Disquiet ILP Contest
March 2011The winner’s work will be published in an upcoming issue of Guernica. -
Video: Mary C. Matthews: Kill the Bill, Ohio
March 2011Thousands of protesters, unionists, and supporters of the American worker descend on Ohio’s capitol city in opposition of Governor Kasich’s SB5 anti-collective bargaining bill. -
Jill Richardson: Groundbreaking New UN Report on How to Feed the World’s Hungry: Ditch Corporate-Controlled Agriculture
March 2011A new report from the UN advises ditching corporate-controlled and chemically intensive farming in favor of agroecology. -
Pepe Escobar: Is Egypt the Future IndoTurkeZil?: So Many Ways to Strut Your Democratic Stuff in a New World
March 2011“Three mummies were recently found in an underground temple in Luxor, Egypt. Translated hieroglyphs identified them as the Clash of Civilizations, the End of History, and Islamophobia. They ruled in Western domains into the second decade of the twenty-first century before dying and being embalmed.” -
Les Leopold: Why the Government’s Unemployment Rate is Dangerously Deceptive—And the Dark Reality it Hides
March 2011The latest jobs report indicates that the unemployment and job creation rates are better than a year ago, but there are problems with the numbers. -
Naomi Klein: Why Climate Change Is So Threatening to Right-Wing Ideologues
March 2011“Climate change challenges everything conservatives believe in. So they’re choosing to disbelieve it, at our peril.” -
Robert Reich: Governor Walker’s Coup D’Etat
March 2011Wisconsin Republicans have made it crystal clear that their goal has had nothing whatever to do with the state budget. It’s been to bust the unions. -
David Bromwich: The Embarrassments of Empire: Washington Wonders What to Say about Arab Freedom
March 2011A person suffers embarrassment when something true about himself emerges in spite of reasonable efforts to conceal it. It is the same with nations. -
Clancy Sigal: Why Is the Media Giving Charlie Sheen So Much Attention?
March 2011We Americans do love our bad showbiz boys running amok. -
Anupa Mistry: John Galliano: Just One of Many Problems In the Fashion Industry
March 2011Dior fired its celebrated head designer for making anti-Semitic statements. But don’t expect a renaissance in the racially tense world of high fashion. -
Robert Reich: Why The Street’s Euphoric Birthday Has Almost Nothing to Do with a Buoyant Economy
March 2011Happy Birthday Wall Street. Party away. Just know that most Americans aren’t joining the celebration. -
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd: Democrats Lodge Ethics Complaint Against Walker Over Prank Call With “David Koch”
March 2011The tighter Walker holds on to his union-busting bill, the weaker his grip on the office of governor. -
Jamie Goldenberg: Willem Andersson and Identity in Military Culture
March 2011“Few civilized countries in the world who have such a war fetish as Americans have.” -
Mya Guarnieri: Xenophobia in Tel Aviv
March 2011
Israel, a county of immigrants gripped by Islamophobia and a rising tide of racism, offers the U.S. a reflection of itself … a frightening glimpse of where America could be headed. -
Ahdaf Soueif to Host Lecture on Egypt at Columbia University Tonight
March 2011
Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif, who is featured in Guernica's next issue, will be lecturing tonight. -
Tom Engelhardt: (N)ever Again: Old Secretaries of Defense Never Die, They Just Write Bestselling Memoirs
March 2011It’s time, once and for all, to lock the gates. It’s time to use the U.S. military only in the genuine defense of this country. -
Robert Reich: The Birth of the People’s Party
March 2011The People’s Party may not yet be recognized by the mainstream media, but it’s growing in numbers and in intensity. And it’s starting to push elected officials—first at the state level—to listen and respond. -
Daniel Denvir: Conservative Sleeper Agents in Hollywood? The Right-Wing's New War for Culture
March 2011The new conservative mediamakers are shedding the baggage of culture war hangups, freeing up energy to infiltrate culture industries and attack the left. -
James Carroll: Where Did All the Fatwas Go?
March 2011How a revolution is changing the way Americans look at Islam. -
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd: Rachel Maddow Beats Glenn Beck — Covering Wisconsin Protests
March 2011Who says you need celebrities to get ratings? Rachel Maddow had a nice surprise last Wednesday when her show got a major ratings boost — as she covered the protests and injustices in Wisconsin and Ohio. -
Robert Reich: The Real News on Jobs
March 2011Conservative economists have it wrong. The underlying problem isn’t that so many Americans have priced themselves out of the global/high-tech labor market. It’s that they’re getting a smaller and smaller share of the pie. -
Jason Mark: How to Create a Sustainable Economy That Makes Daily Life Better
March 2011For too long, environmentalists have been viewed as self-righteous killjoys demanding that everyone overhaul their wasteful habits. It is time to change that. -
Video: Mary C. Matthews: Power to the Pizza
March 2011Ian’s Pizza in Madison, WI has become a beacon of solidarity for people around the world. More than 500 pizzas have been called in, feeding protesters at the capitol building morning, noon, and night. -
Robert Reich: Clarence Thomas and the Politicization of the Supreme Court
March 2011While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics. -
Timothy Donnelly on The Cloud Corporation, Romanticism, and “The Historical Sense”
March 2011
Poet Timothy Donnelly on the inspirations for his new book The Cloud Corporation. -
Trish Bendix: Can Gay Play Straight? What Sexuality Has to Do With Winning Roles and Academy Awards
March 2011If gay actors can’t play straight convincingly, and are losing gay roles to straight actors, what parts are left? -
Michael T. Klare: The Collapse of the Old Oil Order: How the Petroleum Age Will End
March 2011While a handful of major oil-producing areas launched the Petroleum Age … it’s been the Middle East that has quenched the world’s thirst for oil since World War II. -
Rose Ann DeMoro: Why Isn’t Obama Standing With Protesters in Wisconsin?
March 2011The President must make a clear statement of who is responsible for the crisis — the corporate class and the right and those politicians who enable them. -
Sarah Seltzer: Facebook Will Share Users’ Phone Number, Email, and Address with Third Parties
March 2011But bit by bit, Facebook privacy has been vanishing—even as more people put more their lives and information on the site. -
Iman Said: No Exception for Oman
March 2011“[Omanis] are proud of their country’s safety and security and they do not want to ruin that…What they do not know is that what they are doing is a kind of hypocrisy. It is as if you know that your child is sick but you do not want to admit it because you are afraid of what others would say.” -
Rafia Zakaria: The End of Post-Colonialism
March 2011This recent spate of revolutions suggests a move away not only from Islamism but also from the ideological preoccupation with post-colonialism—a move towards a relocation of the power to change within the people themselves. -
Lauren Kelley: How You Can Boycott the Kochs
March 2011The backlash against the Koch influence in Wisconsin is gaining steam, with labor supporters starting to boycott Koch Industries' many products (listed here). -
Robert Reich: How Democrats Can Become Relevant Again (And Rescue the Nation While They’re At It)
March 2011Teachers are being fired, Pell grants for the poor are being slashed, energy assistance for the needy is disappearing, other vital public services shriveling. Regulatory agencies don’t have the budgets to pay the people they need to enforce the law. Where are the Democrats? -
Anonymous from Libya: Daughter of a Martyr
March 2011“[Qaddafi] and his gangsters are trembling. He has nothing to do but to expose his very true personal Libyan Mafia to the world. The more cities he loses control over, the more he threatens and the more blood he adds to his hands.” -
Guernica Contributor Susie Linfield to Participate in Susan Sontag Conference
March 2011Susie Linfield will discuss Sontag's relationship to the female intellectual at City University of New York this Friday, March 4. -
Chris Hellman: The Real U.S. National Security Budget: The Figure No One Wants You to See
March 2011American taxpayers should know just what they are paying for. So let’s go through what we know about the U.S. national security budget, step by step, and add it all up. Buckle your seat belts. -
Katie Halper: GOP War on Women: 10 Names for the Pro-HIV, Pro-Cancer Republican Legislation
March 2011Nothing says “sanctity of life” better than cervical cancer, breast cancer, and HIV! -
Nora Eisenberg: Happy 20th Anniversary to the “End” of the 1991 Gulf War…the War That Never Actually Ended
March 2011Did Bush and Baker mean to maintain the friendlier policy toward Iraq and just mismanage, bungling us into war, as Murray Waas argued at the time? Or did they engage in the most Machiavellian of manipulations, using a seasoned and apparently sincere diplomat to say one thing as they were planning another? -
Iman Said: Report From Oman
February 2011If we have learned anything from the revolts that have spread all over the Arab world, it is that using violence against the protesters makes them more united and determined to get what they came for. -
Andy Kroll: Cairo in Wisconsin: Eating Egyptian Pizza in Downtown Madison
February 2011“For this brief moment at least, people here in Madison are bound together by a single cause, as other protesters were not so long ago, and may be again, in the ancient cities of Egypt.” -
Anne McClintock: Solidarity in Madison: The Wisconsin Mass Protests
February 2011A University of Wisconsin professor reports, with photos, on the extraordinary sense of solidarity at the protests against Governor Scott Walker. -
Phyllis Bennis: Libya Slips Into Civil War, as Democratic Uprisings Rock the Middle East
February 2011Libya, unlike Egypt and Tunisia or the other states where revolutionary upheavals are underway, is moving toward a military confrontation closer to a civil war. -
Matt Petronzio: It’s Okay to Be a (Straight Male) Feminist
February 2011Do I have to be a woman to believe in women’s rights? Do I have to be gay to believe in gay rights? . -
Elissa Strauss: Decades After The Feminine Mystique, Many High-Achieving Women Find Satisfaction in Marriage
February 2011A new book explains why Betty Friedan might have paved the way for equal marriages by blowing the roof off the feminine mystique. -
Anonymous in Libya: Stay in Your Home, You Will Be Safe
February 2011“The world needs to know that what’s happening in Libya is no longer a response to protest; it’s genocide. Qaddafi’s forces shoot civilians from ambulances using anti-aircraft guns! People are struggling against heavy weapons with stones. And now Qaddafi has once again showed up with more bloodcurdling threats to turn Libya into ‘embers of fire.’” -
Variety’s Tim Gray on the Oscars, Conspiracies, and James Franco
February 2011
Variety’s group editor weighs in on this year’s Academy Award nominations and why some films get left out. -
Robert Reich: The Republican Shakedown
February 2011If America had higher marginal tax rates we wouldn’t be firing teachers or slashing Medicaid or hurting the most vulnerable members of our society. -
Greta Christina: High School Atheists Are Organizing—Why Are Schools Pushing Back?
February 2011High school students who try to start atheist groups are being buffered at every turn by the administration, so it's time for them to be more aggressive. -
Tom Engelhardt: All-American Decline in a New World
February 2011You might think that, as vast swathes of the Greater Middle East are set ablaze, someone in Washington would take a new look at our Af/Pak War and wonder whether it isn’t simply beside the point. No such luck. -
Rebecca Bates: In Which the U.S. Military Uses Psychological Warfare Tricks on Americans
February 2011According to Rolling Stone, the U.S. military is getting desperate—that is, desperate enough to try and dupe unwitting senators into giving them more money. -
Paul Armentano: If the Feds Get Their Way, Big Pharma Could Sell Pot—But Your Dime Bag Would Still Send You to Jail
February 2011We should be very wary about the DEA allowing regulation and marketing of pharmaceutical products containing plant-derived THC.
