The Guardian (UK) |
January 17, 2009
| COMMENT
It made few headlines when Dick Cheney,
in the last days of his vice-presidency, dismissed as a caricature the
idea that he was "a Darth Vader type-personality".
Tags: Dick Cheney | Bush Years | The Guardian
The New York Review of Books |
December 04, 2008
| ESSAY
Scandal is our growth industry. Revelation of wrongdoing leads not to definitive investigation, punishment, and expiation but to more scandal.
Tags: David Hare | Gethsemane | Frozen Scandal
The New York Review of Books |
November 20, 2008
| ESSAY
You would think first of all of a village fair:
the entire community of Germantown, Northwest Philly, taking itself up
on the brightest of bright sunny fall days and moving en masse, clumps
of people—groups of young men in the obligatory hoodies and low-riding
jeans, moms pushing strollers, dads lugging car seats, and everywhere
children, from toddlers on up, being pulled along ("You'll remember
this all your life!")—almost all of them African-American and all
melding together, as they crowded toward the entrance to Vernon Park,
into a full running, laughing stream.
Tags: 2008 election | Obama | McCain | Sweet Potato Pie
The New York Review of Books |
November 06, 2008
| ESSAY
Panning across the faces of the country"s leaders gathered in the
Cabinet Room to confront the "financial crisis" in late September, the
camera"s eye moves from the President—looking tired, shrunken,
desiccated—to his Treasury secretary and other powerful advisers, and
then slowly makes its way down and around the long Cabinet table,
trailing over the familiar waxen features of the barons of the Senate
and the House, lingering for a moment on the self-consciously resolute
face of the white-haired Senator John McCain, and finally reaches the
table"s end where it settles at last on the figure of a lean, solitary
black man slumped in his seat.
Tags: Obama | Election | US Politics
October 2008
| INTRODUCTION
Some stories, ancient and eternal, are
inscribed in the world. The Fall of the Hero is one such, an endlessly
reenacted drama that turns on the precariousness of greatness and its
inevitable overreaching.
Tags: Napoleon | Segur | Russia | Military History
The New York Review of Books |
October 16, 2008
| DISPATCH
You would think first of all of a village fair:
the entire community of Germantown, Northwest Philly, taking itself up
on the brightest of bright sunny fall days and moving en masse, clumps
of people—groups of young men in the obligatory hoodies and low-riding
jeans, moms pushing strollers, dads lugging car seats, and everywhere
children, from toddlers on up, being pulled along ("You'll remember
this all your life!")—almost all of them African-American and all
melding together, as they crowded toward the entrance to Vernon Park,
into a full running, laughing stream.
Tags: Sweet Potato Pie | Obama | Philly | Elections
The New York Times |
August 27, 2008
| BOOK REVIEW
Scandal is our growth
industry. In our era, revelation of wrongdoing leads not to definitive
investigation, punishment and expiation but to ... more scandal.
Tags: War on Terror | Bush | CIA | Frozen Scandal | Suskind | Iraq
Tomdispatch.com |
March 25, 2008
| LECTURE/ESSAY
To contemplate a prewar map of Baghdad — as I do the one before me,
with sectarian neighborhoods traced out in blue and red and yellow — is
to look back on a lost Baghdad, a Baghdad of our dreams.
Tags: Foreign Affairs | War on Terror | middle east | Iraq
El Pais |
November 10, 2007
| ESSAY/TRANSCRIPT
Sin duda, uno de los atributos agonizantes de nuestra era posterior al
11-S es la necesidad permanente de reafirmar realidades que han sido
demostradas una y otra vez, y negadas con la misma obstinación por
quienes ocupan el poder oficiel
Tags: Foreign Affairs | middle east | american politics | Iraq | Spanish
The New York Review of Books |
November 08, 2007
| ESSAY/TRANSCRIPT
Surely one of the agonizing attributes of our post-September 11 age is the unending need to reaffirm realities that have been proved, and proved again, but just as doggedly denied by those in power, forcing us to live trapped between two narratives of present history, the one gaining life and color and vigor as more facts become known, the other growing ever paler, brittler, more desiccated, barely sustained by the life support of official power.
Tags: Foreign Affairs | middle east | american politics | Iraq
What Orwell Didn't Know (Book) |
November 2007
| ESSAY
We pride ourselves in being realists first of all, and thus we know
well, or tell ourselves we do, that "the first casualty when war
comes is truth."
Tags: american politics | Foreign Affairs | Orwell
Los Angeles Times |
November 04, 2007
| OP-ED ESSAY
Perhaps it would have surprised George Orwell, poet laureate of the
Cold War, to find himself so much in our thoughts in this second decade
of the post-Cold War age.
Tags: american politics | Orwell | middle east | Foreign Affairs
Los Angeles Times |
June 01, 2007
| OP-ED ESSAY
Being invited to deliver a commencement address to the Department of
Rhetoric is akin to being asked out for a romantic evening by a porn
star.
Tags: War on Terror | Iraq | Media | Foreign Affairs | Commencement
Tomdispatch.com |
May 31, 2007
| SPEECH/ESSAY
When my assistant greeted me, a number of
weeks ago, with the news that I had been invited to deliver the
commencement address to the Department of Rhetoric, I thought it was a
bad joke.
Tags: Media | Foreign Affairs | Commencement | War on Terror | Iraq
The New York Review of Books |
December 21, 2006
| ESSAY
In the ruined city of Fallujah, its pale tan buildings pulverized by
Marine artillery in the two great assaults of this long war (the
aborted attack of March 2004 and then the bloody, triumphant al-Fajr
(The Dawn) campaign of the following November), behind the lines of
giant sandbags and concrete T-walls and barbed wire that surrounded the
tiny beleaguered American outpost there, I sat in my body armor and
Kevlar helmet and thought of George F. Kennan.
Tags: middle east | Iraq
July 2006
| CATALOG ESSAY
In November 2003, barely six months into the Iraq War, Specialist Joseph Darby returned from leave and asked a fellow soldier at Abu Ghraib prison to tell him what had happened while he"d been away.
Tags: middle east | Torture | Iraq
May 04, 2006
| REMEMBRANCE
When I look back over the many years of
conversations with Carol Feldman, I realize that what brought us
together, first and foremost, was our vices.
Tags: Elegies and Appreciations | Carol Feldman
Tomdispatch.com |
February 26, 2006
| INTERVIEW
The phrase I come back to, not only about interrogation but the many
other steps that constitute the Bush state of exception, state of
emergency, since 9/11 is "take the gloves off."
Tags: american politics | middle east | Iraq
February 02, 2006
| REMEMBRANCE
Scanning my memory for especially telling episodes in my friendship
with Fritz has brought much pleasure, for my memories are full of
laughter and also, of course - this is after all Fritz Stern - much
wisdom.
Tags: Fritz Stern
The New York Times Magazine |
September 11, 2005
| ESSAY
Seldom has an image so clearly marked the turning of the world. One of man"s mightiest structures collapses into an immense white
blossom of churning, roiling dust, metamorphosing in 14 seconds from
hundred-story giant of the earth into towering white plume reaching to heaven.
Tags: american politics | middle east | Iraq | War on Terror | Foreign Affairs
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