Author: Tom Engelhardt

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

If I had to pick a single moment when I grasped that we were on a new surveillance planet, it would have been the release of the stunning revelations of Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor now in read more

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

These days, demonstrations follow the president and his policies the way day follows night.  There are the determined protesters who go regularly to the Clarence Dillon Public Library in Bedminster, New Jersey, while the president read more

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

In 1958, Chinese leader Mao Zedong launched an attempt at the instant industrialization of an agricultural society, including the creation of little backyard steel furnaces in its rural countryside. That vast convulsion went by the optimistic name of the Great Leap Forward. It ended up disrupting the country’s read more

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

I can remember lying on my bed with a crumpled up piece of paper in my hand and throwing it at the wall while, in my mind, the announcer’s voice carried on: “It’s a long drive to right field… Furillo is going back, back, back… He leaps! He’s got it!” And I would, of course, catch the paper as it bounced off that wall. It was perhaps the World Series year read more

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

The War Piece to End All War Pieces
Or How to Fight a War of Ultimate Repetitiousness
By Tom Engelhardt

Fair warning. Stop reading right now if you want, because I’m going to repeat myself. What choice do I have, since my subject is the Afghan War (America’s second Afghan War, no less)? I began read more

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

When it comes to guns and Americans, here (thanks to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence) are a couple of stats for you: every year an average of 17,102 children and teens and 116,255 Americans overall are shot in “murders, assaults, suicides, and suicide attempts, unintentional shootings, or by read more

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

It looks like TomDispatch may have a few less readers from now on. Perhaps it will surprise you, but judging by the mail I get, some members of the U.S. military do read TomDispatch — partially to check out the range of military and ex-military read more

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

Two weeks ago, another Trump business went down in flames. Caught in the whirlpool of her father’s presidency, with major department stores and other retail distributors continuing to drop her brand under pressure from consumer boycotts here and in Canada, read more

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

Here are a couple of questions for you: If, in this country, terrorism is to be fought by travel bans, if (as Donald Trump once tweeted) “we don’t want ‘em here,” then why are all the travel bans aimed at Muslims? If the most threatening terror types shouldn’t be traveling either to or in read more

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

Three Failing Experiments?
Mine, America’s, and Humanity’s
By Tom Engelhardt

There was a period in my later life when I used to say that, from the age of 20 to my late sixties, I was always 40 years old; I was, that is, an old young man and a young old one.  Tell that to my legs now.  Of course, there’s nothing faintly strange in such a development.  It’s the most read more