Living Memory
Black archivists, activists, and artists are fighting for justice and ethical remembrance — and reimagining the archive itself.
Black archivists, activists, and artists are fighting for justice and ethical remembrance — and reimagining the archive itself.
On both sides of the Atlantic, art and medicine mingle.
The crudely staged terror-porn of Abu Ghraib has evolved into the highly stylized and sun-kissed wartime selfie
https://www.guernicamag.com/nicholas-miriello-war-in-the-time-of-selfies/
How patriotism means never having to say you’re sorry.
https://www.guernicamag.com/christian-appy-our-merciful-ending-to-the-good-war/
An anthropologist examines the meanings of sacrifice and slaughter—with his own life as the case study.
In Buenos Aires, a tango dancer’s tragic accident ends her career—and unearths longstanding trauma.
For-profit colleges have become American Dream crushers and factories of debt.
https://www.guernicamag.com/astra-taylor-and-hannah-appel-education-with-a-debt-sentence/
Rick Perry visits the new Pacific Theater.
https://www.guernicamag.com/anna-vodicka-dont-mess-with-the-other-texas/
In order to pay for his son Cole’s life-saving surgery, he transported meth. But he got caught.
https://www.guernicamag.com/the-life-sentence-of-dicky-joe-jackson-and-his-family/
Four writers on the gendered world of confessional writing, telling the truth about loved ones, and the line between bravery and betrayal.
From a speech at the Earth at Risk conference, Roy on the misuses of democracy and the revolutionary power of exclusion.
As we grapple with the legal, political, and cultural implications of drone warfare and targeted killing, the renowned anthropologist draws on an older turning point in military ethics—weapons design at Los Alamos.
As the dust settles in Libya, it’s starting to look suspiciously like an invasion for spoils.
The film completely trivializes the suffering and hard work that went into making civil rights a reality. |
Tomorrow Republic of South Sudan celebrates its independence. Guernica counts down its top five reports on Sudan. |
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. |
At a time when camera phones and digital cameras are turning us all into documentarians—a world in which the New Republic’s Jed Perl asks whether photojournalism is a thing of the past—can World Press Photo’s award-winning images show us anything we don’t already know? |
Like vultures descending on a rotting corpse, [big business have] come up with a variety of innovative methods to pull the last scraps of meat off the bones of America’s middle-class. |
One of the aspects of the recent uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia that has not received much attention—not surprisingly—is the role Arabic poetry has played. At times like these, the right poetry and song doesn’t merely describe how people are feeling; it can actually be an intensifier that helps a protest spread and solidify. |
One year after the earthquake that devastated her native Haiti, the novelist on rebuilding the island, art in a time of trouble, and inhabiting bodies.
Here’s a deliciously ironic turn of events: First, columnist Okey Ndibe criticizes the Nigerian government for human rights and elections breaches. Then, the Nigerian government arrests him because they’re tired of his criticism. Next up, election in April. |
Portland’s success in promoting bicycling can be imitated in other U.S. cities—and perhaps surpassed. |
What the Wikileaks revelations tell us about how Washington runs Pakistan. |
Evidence of the Obama administration’s “moral collapse” is profuse; the pattern is clear, the consequences already terrible. |
As long as Americans don’t grasp the connections between our war state and our “safety,” things will only get worse |
As jobless benefits begin to lapse in two weeks, we must ask ourselves why reward the people at the top with an extension of the Bush tax cut that will blow a hole in the budget deficit? And why fail to extend jobless benefits to hardworking Americans who got the boot? |
The best way to defeat right-wing xenophobic “populism” is to build genuine progressive populism. In the process, we can draw on the spirit of the New Deal. |
While American infrastructure crumbles at home, new construction continues in oil-rich kingdoms, sultanates, and emirates there, courtesy of the Pentagon. |
Transgender athletes make a good case for why sports should be inclusive—regardless of gender—in the U.S. |
It’s always nice to talk about international cooperation, but the truth is much more needs to be done to ease tensions that are moving the global economy closer to the brink of outright protectionism. The key responsibility falls to China and America—both internationally and domestically. |
You must have had a moment when you thought to yourself: It really isn’t going to end, is it? For the author of this post, the U.S. military’s $511 million plan for a massive expansion of the U.S. embassy in Kabul inspired one of those moments of hopelessness. |
While the economy of Wall Street big-wigs and corporate execs is recovering nicely, the economy of the average American worker continues to plummet. Here’s why. |
For too long, appeasement has been the name of the game when it comes to dealing with China. The Norwegians changed that on Friday by saluting Liu Xiaobo with the Nobel Peace Prize, which has eluded everyone engaged in the struggle for a less repressive China. |
The election of 2010 is now grim history. It’s time for progressives to go back to the grassroots and organize with renewed, deepened commitment to changing the direction of this country. |
“Whether the country I once wanted to represent was ever there in the form I imagined is a question I’ll leave to the historians What remains, angry or depressed, has made for a toxic brew as well as the most dispiriting election of my life.”—Tom Engelhardt’s ballot box blues for November 2010. |
The political center isn’t about what we decide. It’s about how we decide. |
The road may be bumpy, but unlike the new wave movement of the eighties, today’s indie films are here to stay. |
The American midterm election—in Afghanistan.
In the midst of American election frenzy, a one-man tip sheet on the “global midterms”—prospective winners, losers, and those “on the cusp.” |
This country is run for the benefit of alien life forms. They’ve invaded; they’ve infiltrated; they’ve conquered; and a lot of the most powerful people on Earth do their bidding. |
When our elected representatives can’t and won’t come up with a real jobs program, the Fed feels pressed to come up with a fake one that blows another financial bubble. |
How the proliferation of forward operating bases in Afghanistan signal no end in sight for the nine-year-long war. |
If professors published their work for the public, everyone would have access to better, more reliable information.
A series of studio images focusing on disused electronics, as well as flora and fauna.
The commons is hugely generative in its own right. It is a value-creating sector that rivals the marketplace, and therefore deserves the same protection from government and respect from citizens.
Though the economic crisis has bred xenophobia in our political climate, Democrats should know better than to blame China for our woes.
One Massachusetts public school’s decision to include advertisements in their take-home notices proves that not even our public schools are free from the inundation of advertising.
Borrowing an idea from Colombia, Portland opens its streets to non-motorized traffic on Sunday celebrations.
An excerpt from the foundational work Whose Common Future: Reclaiming the Commons by environmental visionary Edward Goldstein.
Extending tax cuts to the top 2 percent richest Americans didn’t work for Bush, and certainly won’t work now. This is Reich’s call to arms for democrats to jump on the issue.
Kenya’s new constitution is more proof that we can learn from the developing world.
Why is Beethoven’s music still locked behind copyrights? Musopen attempts to release our shared cultural heritage to the world without restraints by freeing public-domain music from centuries ago.
On mission to give the Obamas a White House solar panel from the Jimmy Carter era, the author of this post and students from Unity College experience the enthusiasm gap first hand and learn that even symbolic acts are not free of bureaucratic politicization.
When artist Xiaoda Xiao was twenty years old, he was sent to a forced labor prison in his native China for defacing a portrait of Chairman Mao. This post features a documentary short of Xiao’s reflections on his experiences in labor prison.
Under escalating levels of traffic, the U.S. could (and should) follow Holland’s lead with a bicycle-friendly infrastructure.
The economy needs two whopping corporate tax cuts right now as much as someone with a serious heart condition needs Botox.
In this piece, Bollier reveals how even your local post office isn’t free from the robotic arm of the marketing machine, and why an authentic face-to-face encounter during a monetary transaction is practically impossible in our day and age.
Could she break herself down to the bare necessities like they did? Food, water, work? What were her bare necessities?
Even as the tar balls hit Gulf beaches, American tax dollars are subsidizing BP, and the U.S. military continues to carry on a major business partnership with the company, despite its disastrous environmental record.
Before BP destroyed habitats and livelihoods in the Gulf, Monsanto landed in India. A filmmaker on the time of the GM cotton suicides, and what was learned.
The Ottoman Empire turned “sick man of Europe” builds a new identity and reinserts itself into international conflicts.
https://www.guernicamag.com/john_feffer_stealth_superpower_1/
This June, catch one of jazz’s youngest and most stunning performers.
The term once reserved for failed governments can now successfully be applied to the United States.
This fall, when I was in Krakow, I paused at the Katyn memorial off Krakow’s main square. Today, I would be placing my flowers below the cross if I could.
Childbirth rights in Mozambique, the dark fate of female Cambodian refugees, and the challenges facing maturing female students in developing countries.
Perhaps the U.S. should think twice before shipping its dysfunctional democracy abroad.
Klare’s imaginings of scarce resources and international strife on Earth in 2144 stay uncomfortably true to the direction in which we’re headed today.
Frederick S. Lane: Is it in our best long-term interests to yield more and more control over our private information to the government in the equally futile pursuit of perfect security?
If it looks like jobs aren’t coming back, that we may be stuck with a high level of joblessness for years, voters will take out even more of their anxieties on Democrats next November.
For Americans, 2010 could be the year of the assassin.
As for peacemaking or de-escalation next year, fuggedaboutit 2010: pure loss.
That Goya was a better painter than the earlier, more popular Peter Paul Rubens, or a more intelligent artist than Diego Velazquez, Michelangelo or Rembrandt hardly seems worth mentioning. That he created the Black Paintings, and The Dog, the most thoroughly modern piece in the group, in utter solitude, is food for thought in this age of Artistic Prostitution.
In all likelihood, the White House and the Dems eventually will get a bill they can call “reform,” but they will not be able to say with straight faces that the reform is a significant improvement over the terrible system we already have.
From the start, opponents of the public option have wanted to portray it as big government preying upon the market, and private insurers as the embodiment of the market. But it’s just the reverse.
In Afghanistan, after 30 years under the murderous twin shadows of poverty and war, the only lifeline is peace. From President Obama, we hear that peace is the ultimate goal. But “peace” is a fixture on a strategic horizon that keeps moving as the military keeps marching.
No president in modern times walks a tightrope as exquisitely as this one. His balance is a thing of beauty. But when it comes to this economy right now — an economy fundamentally out of balance — we need a federal government that moves boldly and swiftly to counter-balance the huge recessionary forces still at large.
The Stupak-Pitts amendment, if it becomes incorporated into an eventual health reform measure, would have the effect of further eroding insurance coverage of abortion, ultimately affecting those even with private insurance.
What we really need is a new women’s health movement, one that’s sharp and skeptical enough to ask all the hard questions. What we don’t need, no matter how pretty and pink, is a ladies’ auxiliary to the cancer-industrial complex.
At the core of enabling politics is inner space that’s hollow enough to reliably cave under pressure. Typically, Democrats with antiwar inclinations weaken and collapse at push-comes-to-shove moments on Capitol Hill. The habitual pattern involves loyalty toward — and fear of — “the leadership.”
Shame? If we’ve learned anything over the last year, it’s that Wall Street has none.
The public option proposed by Harry Reid is a token public option, an ersatz public option, a fleeting gesture toward the idea of a public option, so small and desiccated as to be barely worth mentioning except for the fact that it still (gasp) contains the word “public.”
The Fed and the Teasury have, in effect, placed a huge bet on a recovery driven by asset prices. That’s a bad bet. The great disconnect between the stock market and jobs is pushing stock prices way out of line with the real economy. This isn’t sustainable.
Many of the California Democratic Party leaders who voted to approve the out-of-Afghanistan resolution on Nov. 15 have come to see the touted reasons for the U.S. war effort as specious, the mission as Sisyphean and the consequences as profoundly unacceptable.
Disputes are raging within the Obama administration over how to continue the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. A new leak tells us that Washington’s ambassador in Kabul, former four-star general Karl Eikenberry, has cautioned against adding more troops while President Hamid Karzai keeps disappointing American policymakers. This is the extent of the current debate within the warfare state.
People who scrape together enough money to buy health insurance will discover that they’re riding in the back of the nation’s healthcare bus. The most “affordable” policies will be the ones with the highest deductibles and the worst coverage.
If job numbers aren’t moving in the right direction by the mid-terms elections Blue Dog Dems will be more politically endangered then than if they vote for a larger stimulus now.
Obama’s focus on health care rather than jobs, when the economy is still so fragile and unemployment moving toward double digits, could make it appear that the administration has its priorities confused.
Like a giant, gawking adolescent who’s just discovered he can crash the Lexus convertible his rich dad gave him and the next morning have a new one waiting in his driveway courtesy of a dad who can’t say no, the big banks will drive even faster now, taking even bigger risks.
The Obama administration and congressional leaders — with Sen. John Kerry playing a starring role in recent days — are making a determined effort to legitimize the Afghan government as a prelude to further U.S. escalation of the war.
If Obama doesn’t weigh in forcefully and say “no” to the hush money for Big Pharma, big insurance, and the AMA, America’s middle class will get walloped. And if the walloping starts before 2012, Sarah Palin or some other right wing-nut populist will wallop Obama.
Roy DeCarava: chronicler of his own Harlem; eye-poet of the hardscrabble streets where he was born; master at printing subtle variations between black, pitch black, and pitch blacker.
How private health insurers just blew their cover.
President Obama, Afghan War commander Stanley McChrystal, and special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke should put aside their focus on counterinsurgency and counterterrorism and focus instead on H.G. Wells’s 111 year-old novel, The War of the Worlds — and on the thought that we might actually be the Martians of the twenty-first century
Had the world not suffered eight years of George W. Bush, Obama would not be receiving the Prize. He’s prizeworthy and praiseworthy only by comparison.
In each of these areas — healthcare, financial regulation, environment, and jobs — the “better” is really not that much better. Forget perfect; anything that offered real reform would suffice for now. But in every case, what should be the centerpieces of reform are being left out.
With the debt ceiling approaching and the gravitational pull of the 2010 elections increasing, the White House can’t go back to Congress with a formal bill to enlarge the stimulus package. Here are four simple steps that would help small businesses, public schools, childrens’ health, and average working people.
While certainty is lacking, steely resolve is evident. An unspoken mantra remains in effect: When in doubt, keep killing. The knotty question is: Exactly who and how?
Seamus Heaney reminds us that a writer’s life means “the disciplining of a habit of expression until it becomes fundamental to the whole conduct of a life.” The Story About the Story is full of such-disciplined souls.
Despite resistance to it, the public option lives on. It’s still in the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pension bill. It still headlines the House bills, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she’s still committed to it. The latest Times/CBS poll shows 65 percent of the public in favor of it.
https://www.guernicamag.com/robert_reich_the_public_option_1/
Of Nearsighted Progress, Feral Howls, Consensus, Chaos, and a New Cold War in Kashmir.