The Case for Hope, Continued

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Ten years ago, my part of the world was full of valiant opposition to the new wars being launched far away and at home -- and of despair. And like despairing people everywhere, whether in a personal depression...

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

At a certain point in my life, I studied shotokan karate with a remarkable teacher, and then, unable to find her equivalent in the San Francisco Bay Area, took up wing chun for a while with a very amusing guy. At that point, I realized...

Hate Crimes in America (and Elsewhere)

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Here in the United States, where there is a reported rape every 6.2 minutes, and one in five women will be raped in her lifetime, the rape and gruesome murder of a young woman on a bus in...

The Demanding Gifts of 2012

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

As this wild year comes to an end, we return to the season of gifts. Here’s the gift you’re not going to get soon: any conventional version of Paradise. You know, the place where nothing much happens...

Hurricane Sandy Rides In

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

The first horseman was named al-Qaeda in Manhattan, and it came as a message on September 11, 2001: that our meddling in the Middle East had sown rage and funded madness. We had meddled because of imperial ambition...

Against the Destruction of the World by Greed

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

In ancient China, the arrival of a new dynasty was accompanied by “the rectification of names,” a ceremony in which the sloppiness and erosion of meaning that had taken place under the previous...

A Letter to My Dismal Allies

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Dear Allies,

Forgive me if I briefly take my eyes off the prize to brush away some flies, but the buzzing has gone on for some time. I have a grand goal, and that is to...

Occupy Wall Street’s First Anniversary

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Occupy is now a year old.  A year is an almost ridiculous measure of time for much of what matters: at one year old, Georgia O’Keeffe was not a great painter, and Bessie Smith wasn’t much of a...

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

One evening over dinner, I began to joke, as I often had before, about writing an essay called “Men Explain Things to Me.” Every writer has a stable of ideas that never make it to the racetrack, and I’d been trotting this pony out recreationally...

The Drug Trade and GNP (Gross National Pain)

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Dear Mexico,

I apologize. There are so many things I could apologize for, from the way the U.S. biotech corporation Monsanto has contaminated your corn to the way Arizona...

Sending Debt Peonage, Poverty, and Freaky Weather Into the Arena

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com.

When I was growing up, I ate books for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and since I was constantly running out of reading material, I read everyone else’s -- which for...

Occupy Heads into the Spring

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

When you fall in love, it’s all about what you have in common, and you can hardly imagine that there are differences, let alone that you will quarrel over them, or weep about them, or be torn apart...

Notes on 2011’s Preoccupied Hearts and Minds

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Usually at year’s end, we’re supposed to look back at events just passed -- and forward, in prediction mode, to the year to come. But just look around you! This moment is so extraordinary...

You Can Crush the Flowers, But You Can’t Stop the Spring

Cross-posted from TomDispatch.com

Last Tuesday, I awoke in lower Manhattan to the whirring of helicopters overhead, a war-zone sound that persisted all day and then started up again that Thursday...

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Dear young man who died on the fourth day of this turbulent 2011, dear Mohammed Bouazizi,

I want to write you about an astonishing year -- with three months yet to run. I want to tell you about the power of despair and...

Recently, Nelson Mandela turned 93, and his nation celebrated noisily, even attempting to break the world record for the most people simultaneously singing “Happy Birthday.” This was the man who, on trial by the South African government in 1964, stood a good chance...

Crossposted with TomDispatch.com.

How can I tell a story we already know too well? Her name was Africa. His was France. He colonized her, exploited her, silenced her, and even decades after it was supposed to have ended, still acted with a high hand in resolving her affairs...

Crossposted with TomDispatch.com.

The first American responses to the triple calamity in Japan were deeply empathetic and then, as news of the Fukushima nuclear complex’s leaking radiation spread, a lot of people began to freak out about their own safety, and pretty soon you couldn’t find potassium iodide...

Crossposted with TomDispatch.com

Revolution is as unpredictable as an earthquake and as beautiful as spring. Its coming is always a surprise, but its nature should not be.

Revolution is a phase, a mood, like spring, and just as spring has its buds and showers, so revolution has its...

Crossposted with TomDispatch.com.

After the Macondo well exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, it was easy enough (on your choice of screen) to see a flaming oil platform, the very sea itself set afire with huge plumes of black smoke rising, and the dark smear of what would...