Originally appeared at TomDispatch. Though I was never in the U.S. military, my life experience has been American wars, wars, wars, and more wars. I was born during World War II. I was in grade school when the Korean War took place. I still have a faint memory of a...

Walk through any art museum and you’re likely to see a mix of the classical and contemporary, impressionist and surrealist, refined and raw, beautiful, eerie, and provocative. Looking at art allows me at least a few moments of relief from the “that’s just the way it...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Hey, electric cars? It’s obvious that they’ve come into their own now that Tesla’s Elon Musk has once again been granted his (no, this is not a misprint!) $44.9 billion pay package by that company’s shareholders after a Delaware judge...

Strange to think that, without Daniel Ellsberg, Watergate might never have happened, Richard Nixon might have remained president, and the war in Vietnam might have taken even longer to end. So many decades later, it’s easy to forget how, in June 1971, when Ellsberg...

Originally published at TomDispatch. It was truly another world. I’m thinking of my childhood years when to “duck and cover” under our school desks, imagining that those modest structures might somehow protect us from an atomic blast, was a normal part of life. And...

Forget the dead for a moment and think about the living. We’re talking about a minuscule, 25-mile strip of land on which, before recent events began, an estimated 2.4 million people lived, went to school, worshiped, farmed, did whatever. When Israel responded to...

Originally appeared at TomDispatch. Yes, the number of deaths in Gaza in the last seven months is staggering. At least, 35,000 Gazans have reportedly perished, including significant numbers of children (and that’s without even counting the possibly 10,000 unidentified...

One, erratic and often unhinged, blew up the U.S.-Iran accord that was the landmark foreign policy achievement of President Obama’s second term. He then ordered the assassination of a top Iranian general visiting Iraq, dramatically raising tensions in the region. The...

Originally appeared at TomDispatch. I was born on July 20, 1944, barely a year before the world (potentially) ended. On August 6 and 9, 1945, the U.S., which had already been torching Japanese cities from the air, dropped the first atomic bombs on the cities of...

Originally appeared at TomDispatch When you watch the latest TV news on Israel’s war in Gaza, it feels as if its military had invaded another country. So, it’s important to remind ourselves that the tens of thousands of weapons the Biden administration has been...