Author: Tom Engelhardt

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

Give the president, his administration, and his party credit. They’re doing their damnedest to undermine this election and elections to come: from voter suppression to selling doubt about the most basic aspects of American democracy (including voting read more

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History’s a joke, right? We know that from our president who creates laughable moments of history daily — as when, reading from a script recently, he pronounced America’s famed Yosemite National Park “Yo-Semite.” In that context, let me bring read more

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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

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

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

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

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