Author: Tom Engelhardt

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

In the days after the 9/11 attacks, I remember heading downtown — I live in New York City — to see what was already being called “Ground Zero” (a term previously applied only to the site of an atomic blast like the one at Hiroshima). read more

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What am I a fan of these days? Once upon a time, I would have said the New York Mets (or, far earlier, the Brooklyn Dodgers), or the New York (football) Giants, or the New York (basketball) Knicks. No longer. I can’t tell you why, but since the pandemic began, I’ve simply stopped doing what I had done all my life — listen to “my” team on the radio, then (once a TV read more

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It’s not that I’ve never had a gun in my hands before. When I was a youngster, I shot .22s at a target range. But guns in the closet, often military-style ones? That’s not been part of my experience as a citizen. Sad to say, though, my gun-less household may, in a distinctly imaginable future, find itself in a minority in this country. After all, read more

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Yep, it happened again for the read more

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When it came to work and the pandemic, you could say that I led the way. By the time it struck, I had left my job as an editor in publishing and had been working at home for decades. I was, in that sense, a remote worker long before Zoom made working from home a potential reality of everyday life. Mind you, in those pre-pandemic years, I was also toiling alone in my little read more

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Welcome to the Martians!
Our World Is Increasingly Like a Science-Fiction Novel

By Tom Engelhardt

Who knew that Martians, inside monstrous tripodal machines taller than many buildings, actually ululated, that they made eerily haunting “ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla” sounds? Well, let me tell you that they do — or rather did when they were devastating London.

I know that because I recently reread read more

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Don’t you wonder sometimes why officials in Washington have never paid the slightest attention to that famous old Vietnam-era song lyric, “War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!”? After all, two decades of read more

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I have to admit that, in 2018, when I first read in the Guardian that, later in this century, the deadliest place for climate-change-induced heat waves read more

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Back in 2007, in his first piece for TomDispatch, retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian William Astore focused on the proliferation of self-congratulatory ribbons and medals on the chests of America’s generals. read more

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What a burst of attention, analysis, and read more