Author: Tom Engelhardt

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Here’s a truth (or do I mean a truism?): you’re only young once. I say that, of course, as I head for my 80th year on this planet. But as TomDispatch regular and co-chair of the read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Hey, here’s the good news! Last week, despite a looming congressional budget shutdown, Senate and House leaders actually agreed on the outline of a budget deal that would keep the money flowing. Above read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Here’s one obvious point that isn’t made often enough: American taxpayers are now spending close to a trillion dollars a year on what’s still called “national security,” but should really be called “national insecurity.” Think about it for a moment. read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

At some level, it wasn’t very complicated for me. Simply put, I was horrified by the Hamas assault on Israel: the slaughter of kids attending a music festival, the killing of old folks and children in kibbutzes, and the kidnapping of about 240 people (again including the elderly and children). That was in no uncertain terms a first-class horror.

But when, only a couple of read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

How strange to be living through it a second time, however different the form.

I’m thinking, of course, about a devastating set of totally unexpected attacks on one’s homeland. On September 11, 2001, it was the World Trade Center in downtown New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., with read more

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Think of Donald Trump as, in his own fashion, a creature of climate change. After all, in 2015, he descended that escalator into the election race denouncing immigrants read more

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Honestly, as 2021 ended, if I had predicted a Russian invasion of and unrelenting globalized war in Ukraine in 2022 and, in 2023, an explosion in the Middle East, beginning with a horrific Hamas incursion into Israel followed by the utter devastation of Gaza (while the Greater Middle East read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Yes, “the world” just gathered in the United Arab Emirates, a major oil producer, to decide the fate of our planet. And among those attending COP28 were at least 1,300 fossil-fuel lobbyists (three times the read more

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Today, TomDispatch regular Mattea Kramer and Doctor Sean Fogler offer a vivid, moving, and deeply personal look at addiction in America as 2023 ends. They focus above all on perhaps the most dangerous, even devastating, addiction around. I’m thinking, of course, read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

In my childhood, we at least acknowledged the ominous existence of nuclear weapons, no matter how weirdly. I’m thinking about those times we kids spent at school “ducking and covering” under our read more