Consider me an A-bomb baby. I was just a year old when, in the war my father had been part of, my country dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, devastating those two cities and killing more than 200,000 people, including an estimated 38,000 children. Like so...
Reprinted from TomDispatch: What constitutes national security and how is it best achieved? Does massive military spending really make a country more secure, and what perils to democracy and liberty are posed by vast military establishments? Questions like those are...
Originally appeared at TomDispatch. Give Donald Trump credit. He’s added new meaning to that ancient phrase “gunboat diplomacy.” In fact, by the time I wrote this introduction, his administration had already attacked 35 boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Eastern...
Originally appeared at TomDispatch. These days, no kids in school are ducking and covering under their desks. American magazines don’t have stories about families (with the money) building private nuclear shelters to guard against an attack on this country. And I can...
From TomDispatch: Once in the previous century, I actually visited the city of Hiroshima. I was an editor at Pantheon Books and had published a translation of a Japanese volume, Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors. In it, years later, a few...
Rooting out terrorism and antisemitism was the supposed reason that plainclothed ICE agents arrested doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk on a street in Somerville, Massachusetts, after she coauthored an op-ed calling on Tufts University to divest from companies with ties...
Reprinted from TomDispatch: Donald Trump remains a mystery man of some eerie sort. After all, just ask yourself, why in the world did he only recently announce that this country was going to “immediately” resume nuclear testing, not having tested a nuclear weapon —...
Reprinted from TomDispatch: There’s one rule in the age of Donald Trump. When it comes to him, you simply can’t rule anything out. It’s true that, only recently, when asked about the possibility that he would order military strikes not just on ships off the coast of...
Reprinted from TomDispatch: Earlier this month, President Donald Trump threatened to unleash the armed forces on more American cities during a rambling address to top military brass. He told the hundreds of generals and admirals gathered to hear him that some of them...
The renaming of the Defense Department should have surprised no one. Donald Trump is an incipient fascist doing what such figures do. Surrounded by a coterie of illiberal ideologues and careerist sycophants, he and his top aides have dispensed with pretense and...
