Originally posted at TomDispatch. Back in the distant year 2003, my novel about a world I had inhabited for decades, The Last Days of Publishing, came out. In its last pages, three superannuated book editors huddled in a coffee shop in Manhattan, dreaming about DIY...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. When Barack Obama took office, the sky was the limit in the Greater Middle East. After all, it seemed the U.S. had hit rock bottom. President Bush had set the region aflame with a raging debacle in Iraq, a sputtering conflict in...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. If it’s Tuesday, this must be Belgium – the title of a 1969 romantic comedy – could now fit two intertwined phenomena: the madcap global travels of Secretary of State John Kerry and the nonstop journey of the latest revelations from...
The foreign leaders are dropping like flies – to American surveillance. I’m talking about serial revelations that the National Security Agency has been spying on Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, two Mexican presidents, Felipe Calderón (whose office the...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Hey, Private First Class Dorothy: when that next tornado hits Kansas, it’s slated to transport you not to Oz, but to somewhere in Africa, maybe Chad or Niger or Mauritania. And that’s war, American-style, for you, or so...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. In terms of pure projectable power, there’s never been anything like it. Its military has divided the world – the whole planet – into six "commands." Its fleet, with 11 aircraft carrier battle groups, rules the seas and has...
In case you hadn’t noticed, Israel has been in the news a lot lately. After all, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived at the U.N. in the midst of an Iranian "charm offensive," just as presidents Obama and Rouhani were having the first...
Sometimes, the world sends you back to school. These last months have offered us a crash course – call it Surveillance 101 – in how Washington, enveloped in a penumbra of extreme secrecy, went to work creating a global surveillance state on a scale almost...
This may be a propitious moment to offer an up-to-date version of a classic riddle: Which came first, the chicken or the terrorist? For many in this country, the Kenyan mall horror arrived out of the blue, out of nowhere, out of a place and a time without context....
Listen to Ann Jones on Monday's Scott Horton Show The Afghan War is officially winding down. American casualties, generally from towns and suburbs you’ve never heard of unless you were born there, are still coming in. Though far fewer American troops are in the...
