Author: Tom Engelhardt

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

It Could Have Been Different
My World and (Unfortunately) Welcome to It
By Tom Engelhardt

Let me be blunt. This wasn’t the world I imagined for my denouement. Not faintly. Of course, I can’t claim I ever really imagined such a place. Who, in their youth, considers their death and the world that might accompany it, the one you might leave behind for younger generations? I’m read more

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In the midst of the pandemic from hell, with a president who seems incapable of grasping the reality of, no less dealing with, the spreading virus, as deaths mount and cases cascade, in a land where a Covid-19 “second wave” in the fall isn’t conceivable because the first will never have ended, it’s easy to forget about pandemics past. In fact, I did.

But I did live through read more

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No question about it. In 1991, it was the greatest power on the face of the Earth. There had never been anything like it — or so it seemed when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union, that other superpower of the Cold War era, imploded. Left alone on the planet, read more

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Yes, it’s possible that a vaccine for Covid-19 could be available by spring. I mean, I wouldn’t put my money on it, but it seems at least conceivable. Here’s something I would put a few bucks on, though: when a vaccine appears, the Trump administration will have so botched things that read more

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Our lives are, of course, our histories, which makes us all, however inadvertently, historians. Part of my own history, my other life — not the TomDispatch one that’s consumed me for the last 14 years — has been editing books. I have no idea how many books I’ve edited since I was in my twenties, but undoubtedly hundreds. Recently, I began rereading read more

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It wasn’t magic. It wasn’t astrology. Not faintly. But it was in the stars. No, not this specific pandemic, but a pandemic. In fact, back in 2010, TomDispatch ran a piece by John Barry on that very subject. He’s the expert on the “Spanish Flu,” the 1918-1919 pandemic that killed an estimated 50 read more

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He sent what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called his “unidentified storm troopers” togged out like soldiers in a war zone onto streets filled with read more

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Here’s the strange thing. It never crossed my mind — how could it have? — but in work terms I’ve been testing out a Covid-19 world for the last decade and a half. I ran TomDispatch in those years, full time, from a small office in my own apartment in relative isolation. Yes, I could take the subway to see friends, read more

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

Think about this: in the wake of the president’s bungled response to Covid-19 — even Oklahoma’s governor came down with it after attending read more

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“The Bleeding Wound”
Osama bin Laden Won (Twice)
By Tom Engelhardt

It’s July 2020 and I’m about to turn 76, which, as far as I’m concerned, officially makes me an old man. So put up with my aging, wandering brain here, since (I swear) I wasn’t going to start this piece with Donald J. Trump, no matter his latest wild claims or bizarre statements, increasingly white read more