Author: Tom Engelhardt

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Don’t imagine that anything truly began at the Capitol on January 6th. Admittedly, as TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy, author of the upcoming imperial history read more

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To the best of my memory, I first met Noam Chomsky in 1970. No, admittedly not in person, not then. But I “met” him through his remarkable essay “After Pinkville,” his look, in the midst of the Vietnam War, at a world of My Lai massacres. read more

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Let me make my own position on China all too clear. I’m distinctly “soft” on that country. I always have been. After all, it represents a remarkable civilization, one I studied in graduate school. Among my greatest regrets is never having visited there, never having made it to the Great Wall or any of its other memorable historical landmarks. China has indeed “risen” read more

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Yes, unbelievably enough, her vote seems to control the direction that American politics is going to take in this era. I’m thinking about Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona Democratic senator who, like that king read more

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I’ve never suggested this in any of these little introductions I’ve been writing for 19 years now, but it might make sense to read TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon’s piece first today and think of this as my afterword. As it happens, she writes movingly about Barbara Lee read more

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Hey, these days the world really is a barrel of cheery news, isn’t it? Take the U.S. and China. How much more swimmingly could relations between them go on this planet of sickness and heat? Just in case you missed it, despite the attack on the Capitol on January 6th and his read more

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It’s hard to imagine how I would have done my work at TomDispatch over the last decade without one crucial resource: Brown University’s Costs of War Project. read more

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Just in case you didn’t realize it, the lost war in Afghanistan was their fault, not ours. If we had any fault at all, as Secretary of Defense and former Iraq War commander Lloyd Austin pointed out at a Senate hearing last week, it was not fully grasping how bad our Afghan allies — in other words, the very government and military we had created there — were. read more

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Recently, I stumbled across an old book project of mine, long forgotten. It was something I had been writing in perhaps 1998 and 1999 but never finished. In reading through it, I was surprised to discover a reference to climate change (“…even the unlikely removal of every nuclear weapon from this earth wouldn’t come close to purging the planet of exterminatory consciousness read more

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Forget old hot wars or even new cold ones — the weather’s clearly changing. In fact, according to a new study, read more