A blog about a criminal enterprise
Paul Bloom’s book Against Empathy was bound to be either advocacy for cruelty and sadism, or a horribly misguided attempt to improve the world, or false advertising (it would turn out he’s only against the most narrowly or bizarrely defined concept of empathy), or genuinely interesting. It turns out to be a combination of the last two, plus a third part made up of numerous lengthy but tangentially related topics — some of them also interesting.
The book’s subtitle is “The Case for Rational
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Never forget it: Donald Trump rode birtherism like a surfboard into the White House. He first played the birther card back in 2011 (“I’m starting to think that [Obama] was not born here”), and the next year cited “an extremely credible source” that Obama’s birth certificate
Francesco Duina is the author of Broke and Patriotic: Why Poor Americans Love Their Country.
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A recent study of insect life in protected nature reserves in Germany got the most modest attention in our busy Trumpian world. In the last 27 years, however, researchers found that flying insect populations there had dropped 76% seasonally and 82% in mid-summer (when insect numbers are
The eternal question of U.S. politics rears its ugly ass again: “Why in the hell does anyone ever listen to Alan Dershowitz?”
No court can overturn a Congressional impeachment and conviction. Will somebody at Fox and CNN page the nearest genocidal torture-defending lawyer, who is either Alan Dershowitz or someone joining him on a search for the real O.J. Simpson killer at a five-star restaurant for lunch today, and get Dershowitz a copy of the United States Constitution?
The Constitution gives
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
America’s Addictions
Opioids, Donald Trump, and War
By Tom Engelhardt
When you think of addiction in America today, one thing comes to mind: the opioid epidemic. And it should. It’s serious. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, almost 64,000 Americans died of opioid
C.J. Hinke has produced probably the best collection I’ve read of writings by and about conscientious objectors and war refusers behind bars. It’s called Free Radicals: War Resisters in Prison.
The book is a bit of a time capsule, somewhat along the lines of Daniel Ellsberg’s recent book revealing the substance of the other half of the Pentagon Papers decades later. In fact, Hinke actually found this manuscript, which he had begun in 1966 and lost a couple of years later in the
Recently, when 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an obscure, upfront democratic socialist from the Bronx, easily defeated one of the most powerful U.S. Congressmen in the Democratic primary, the story became an overnight sensation. How, the pundits wondered, could this upset have occurred?
Actually, it shouldn’t have been a total surprise for, in recent years, democratic socialism has been making a remarkable comeback in American life. Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist U.S. Senator
There was something quite odd about the very welcome news that some Google employees were objecting to a military contract, namely all the other Google military contracts. My sense of the oddness of this was heightened by reading Yasha Levine’s new book, Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet.
I invited Levine on my radio show (it will air in the coming weeks) and asked him what he thought was motivating the revolt over at Google.
I’m going to praise the heck out of yet another terrific book I’ve just read while yet again exclaiming (into a deep empty echoing canyon?) my bewilderment and outrage at the glaring omission it makes — the same one as all the other books.
George Monbiot’s Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis is part familiar; part original, creative, and inspiring; and pretty much all right-on and necessary. Its first chapter should be required reading everywhere — with the