Originally posted at TomDispatch. As is often the case, I opened the Monday newspaper curious to find out how the weekend had gone at the movies. The headline read, “‘Ghostbusters’ Is No. 2 Behind ‘Secret Life of Pets.’” That meant...
I recently dug my mother’s childhood photo album out of the depths of my bedroom closet. When I opened it, I found that the glue she had used as a girl to paste her life in place had given way, and on many pages the photos were now in a jumble. My mother was born...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. At almost 72, I recently went to The Legend of Tarzan, the IMAX version, with a screen so big I almost stepped inside it and a soundscape so all-enveloping that my already pathetic hearing might have been blown away for good. Still,...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Strangely, amid the spike in racial tensions after the killing of two black men by police in Louisiana and Minnesota, and of five white police officers by a black sharpshooter in Dallas, one American reality has gone unmentioned. The...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Imagine a secret government facility buried deep in the bowels of a mountain; a deluxe bomb shelter – encased within dense, almost fissure-less rock – for top government officials to ride out doomsday. I did. A lot. I spent an...
Vladimir Putin recently manned up and admitted it. The United States remains the planet’s sole superpower, as it has been since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. “America,” the Russian president said, “is a great power. Today, probably, the...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Here’s an oddity: Americans recognize corruption as an endemic problem in much of the world, just not in our own. And that’s strange. After all, to take but one example, America’s twenty-first-century war zones have...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Here’s an unavoidable fact: we are now in a Brexit world. We are seeing the first signs of a major fragmentation of this planet that, until recently, the cognoscenti were convinced was globalizing rapidly and headed for...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. One of the strangest news developments of our time is the way the media now focus for days, if not weeks, 24/7, on a single event and its ramifications. Omar Mateen’s slaughter of 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando is...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. On October 7, 2001, less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration launched a bombing campaign against Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. An invasion to “liberate” the country followed. Almost 15 years...
