Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, No Football, No Trump

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

My dad came from Brooklyn, which meant I was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan from the start. One year, I even lost whatever I had saved up from my microscopic allowance betting on World Series games with Gus, who worked behind the soda fountain at the local drugstore. When he refused to take my money, my father made me pay anyway. (“A man,” he told me sternly, “always pays his read more

This is what American democracy has sunk to: Two Mentally Challenged Candidates to Choose Between for US President?

By Dave Lindorff

The US is heading into uncharted waters as a polity, with the two likely candidates for president this November both clearly suffering from significant cognitive impairment and evidence of continuing mental decline. 

Back in 1980, the American voters elected a man, Ronald Reagan, who unbeknownst to them already had the beginnings of Alzheimer’s dementia. By 1984 and his campaign for a second term of office, his White House staff and his wife Nancy read more

Talk Nation Radio: Tim Schwartz on How to Do Whistleblowing

Tim Schwartz is the author of a new book called A Public Service: Whistleblowing, Disclosure, and Anonymity. Tim Schwartz’s career focuses on data privacy and digital information as an artist, activist, and technologist. He specializes in teaching techniques for challenging power while protecting one’s identity. Schwartz co-organizes the digital training organization Los Angeles Cryptoparty, a member of the Electronic Frontier Alliance. He read more

Tomgram: Liz Theoharis, Circling the Ruins

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

So here’s a basic dose of President Trump: On April 14th, he met with a group of Covid-19 survivors in the cabinet room of the White House and, citing the “Spanish Flu” pandemic of 1918 in which, he claimed, 75 million to 100 million people died globally, he offered this bit of typical (and typically only semi-coherent) self-congratulation:

“But not since then have we read more

Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, (Un)Reality TV, 2020-Style

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

He hosted 14 seasons of The Apprentice and its successor, The Celebrity Apprentice, and in all those years I probably spent seven minutes watching the show, or flipping past it as I looked for something else — and, as far as I was concerned, that was seven minutes too many. I don’t want you to think that I didn’t watch my share of junk on TV. I did. read more

COVID-19 and the Wasting Disease of Normalcy

“But what of the price of peace?” asked Jesuit priest and war resister Daniel Berrigan, writing from federal prison in 1969, doing time for his part in the destruction of draft records. “I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder. How many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for the peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm in the direction of their loved ones, in the direction read more

Tomgram: John Feffer, Trump Rex

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

At maybe age 13, I can remember reading H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, his Martian invasion classic in which aliens tear up London, under the covers by flashlight while I was supposed to be asleep — and I’ve read science fiction ever since. Ditto dystopian fiction from the time I stumbled read more

What’s the Matter With Science?

What’s the matter with science? By that, do I mean, why don’t we turn away from corrupt politics and religion and follow the way of science? Or do I mean, why have we allowed science to so corrupt our politics and our culture? I mean, of course, both.

We don’t need an uneducated jackass telling people how to control a viral pandemic because he’s a president. At the same time, we don’t need corporate, for-profit, and ignorant media outlets using the arrogant science of computer models read more