Abby Margulies

Radical Realism

By November 2, 2015

An exhibition at the Jewish Museum brings together a group of largely unknown artists creating provocative and unexpected work.

Shifting States

By May 15, 2015

What can two portraits of President-elect Muhammadu Buhari, taken three decades apart, tell us about Nigeria’s political climate?

Raw Nerve

By April 15, 2015

The New Yorker’s art editor on learning English through imagery, comics as cultural barometer, and collaborating with Art Spiegelman.

This Huge Equilibrium

By April 1, 2015

On director Wim Wenders’s documentary The Salt of the Earth, a look at the career and conservation efforts of photographer Sebastião Salgado.

Humane Endeavor

By November 17, 2014

The surgeon and public health journalist on the gaps in healthcare policy, the sharp elbows of politics, and dignity in end-of-life care.

Notes for the Stage

By June 2, 2014

The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright on his relationship to Jewish artists, “the simple sense of being human,” and experiencing his work for the first time along with its audience.

Running to the River

By March 3, 2014

The Caine Prize-winning writer on resurrecting history’s ghosts, finding stories amid political violence, and why “Kenya is a mercurial character.”

Playing Favorites

By February 3, 2014

If a company were to commit to decline all government censorship surveillance requests, it would be able to do business precisely nowhere.

Mystery Is All There Is

By August 15, 2013

The prize-winning novelist on learning English by copying out Moby Dick, politics in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and his compulsion to write from a terrorist’s perspective.

Stone Wars

By August 1, 2013

In the disputed territory of Kashmir, civilians wage a battle without modern weapons against “the idea of domination.”

Smoke Screen

By August 15, 2011

In Afghanistan, the U.S. military disposes of garbage—computers, motorbikes, TVs, shoes, even human feces—in open burn pits. Are toxic clouds from these sites making everyone sick?

Running the Lines for Fulgence

By August 15, 2011
The coroner told me at the morgue that the mudslide had crushed Fulgence quickly, and the density of the dislodged soil meant that there would not have been enough oxygen for him to suffer.

Democracies of Bread

By August 15, 2011
The author of Day of Honey discusses ancient Iraqi cooking, the Middle East’s dependence on imported wheat, and the link between bread and civilian uprisings.

On the Fly: Belva Davis

By August 15, 2011
Broadcast journalist Belva Davis on her family’s move from Louisiana to Oakland, California, her new memoir, and becoming the first female African American television reporter on the West Coast.

Robin Yassin-Kassab: Resistance Regime?

By August 11, 2011
 Nobody knows what kind of regime may rise after the Asads. One thing is certain, however: if the next system is to any extent democratic or representative, it will struggle for the rights of the Palestinian people.

Code of the West

By August 1, 2011

Checking the pulse of Colorado’s blend of faith, politics, and violence, Sharlet comes face to face with a college friend’s colorful political supporters.

The Switchboard

By August 1, 2011
The wry poet on the crossover between poetry and the punk rock scene, O’Hara and Ginsberg, and embracing technology.

Social Business

By August 1, 2011
Was Nobel Peace Laureate Muhammad Yunus’s sacking from the microlending bank he created part of a conspiracy to discredit and force him out?

Thunder in April

By July 1, 2011

suddenly, strangely peopled, like Robin / in sheaves of rain, the land blurs April / into a fiction that never ends

Island

By July 1, 2011

But none could slap my face as hard as the sea slaps / its adopted child and then steps back, all tears.

1977

By July 1, 2011

Star Wars premiered as they cut the exiguous flap of my umbilical.

Other Cultures, Other Realms

By July 1, 2011
For his guest-edited issue, Ilya Kaminsky chooses nine far-flung writers who attempt to answer the question, “What are poets to do in this moment of uncertainty?”

Self Study

By July 1, 2011
In each image I’ve incorporated myself twice, once as the Iranian and once as the American.

The Importance of Good Company

By July 1, 2011

James Harold Jennings was a visionary artist and well-known eccentric in his hometown of Pinnacle, North Carolina. And, perhaps, the American brand of fear, fatalism, and nihilism.

Forgotten but Not Gone

By July 1, 2011

On the fiftieth anniversary of Borges’s first visit to Texas, Eric Benson searches for traces of the fabulist in the Lone Star State.

Death Doctrine

By July 1, 2011

Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and Angola were the three rings of the Reagan Doctrine, the war by proxy, and none turned out well. And the former president’s support of despots and violent insurgencies guaranteed a future of errant, and deadly, U.S. foreign policy.

The Sick and the Well

By July 1, 2011
Lynne Tillman discusses her latest mindfuck story collection and how social reading platforms erode the barrier between writer and reader.

Contested Territory

By July 1, 2011
On July 9, southern Sudan is scheduled to become the world’s newest country. Rebecca Hamilton discusses the impact of this change on the rest of the region.

Off the Grid

By June 15, 2011

A photographer and former Peace Corps volunteer in Ghana observes the beauty of the dark and the politics of electricity. (With video.)

Paris Stupides

By June 15, 2011
What if a site with the exact geographical features of Paris had existed at another spot on the globe?

Outside the Gates of Troy

By June 15, 2011

They sit down in an orderly, patient manner, packed together in the belly of the beast. The smell of varnish lingers on inside and intoxicates them all.

My First Time, Twice

By June 15, 2011

Ariel Levy on the rush to lose her virginity at fourteen, recalling: “Nobody would gasp if they heard a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old had lost her virginity. The clock was ticking.”

The Birth of Venus

By June 15, 2011

Where there are no words, knowledge comes through physical acts and through the space through which those acts are made.

The Story of the Story of O

By June 15, 2011

The Story of O shocked readers worldwide with its sadomasochistic love affair written in a style “too direct, too cool, to be that of a woman.” Carmela Ciuraru examines the life of O’s author.

Untitled

By June 15, 2011
I have seen a woman transform into a garden and a garden become increasingly more of a woman.

East Beirut, 1978

By June 1, 2011
“Self,” she queried, “should we just kill him and be done?” She smoked, exhaling through her nose like a dragon.

Pyramid Schemes

By June 1, 2011

Will witch hunts for deserters and its initial refusal to arrest Mubarak lead Egypt’s military down a blind alley of violence and tyranny?

Chernobyl Zone

By June 1, 2011
There’s something almost magical about the zone. Nature grows exuberantly, wild animals reproduce. There are even people living in Chernobyl.

Under the Volcano

By May 15, 2011

Elected in 2009, leftist Mauricio Funes became the first Salvadoran president to apologize for government death squads. Dara Kerr investigates the massacre and subsequent cover-up, the U.S. role in the killings, and the backdrop for an unprecedented apology.

Excavation

By May 15, 2011
The author Amitav Ghosh discusses the link between anthropology and writing, The New Yorker’s edit of his essay on the Iraq war, and John Updike’s worst book.

Terror of the Back Eighty Acres

By May 15, 2011

He grew tame // and hunted the dreams of farm kids—every tree scratch / on the window were his nails, every pregnant farm girl // was knocked up with the devil's seed and spiderbabies.

On the Fly: Mike Daisey

By May 15, 2011
Writer and monologist Mike Daisey describes his inspirations, working customer relations at Amazon, and his latest production, The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.

Chak and Awe

By May 15, 2011

The Taliban is alive and active. James Fergusson recounts his face-to-face meeting, in a mine-protected Afghan village, with one of the feared group’s most powerful figures.

Ten Micro Stories

By May 15, 2011
“Every man is limited to a certain number of words in his lifetime... Some of these words might also be words that you whisper in a foreign language that you don’t even know, in a dream, for example”: ten micro-fiction pieces.

Full Metal Racket

By May 1, 2011
The Rolling Stone reporter on his blockbuster articles, how the generals pushed Obama into a war he didn’t want to fight, and the Pentagon’s effort to tear down the wall between PR and propaganda.

Mansion

By May 1, 2011
The floor was made of dirt, the walls dark and smooth, the ceiling just high enough for us to stand upright. You could walk a quarter mile before it ended, cut off by a stone wall. And it was in this tunnel that Darcie heard the voice of her mother, who was dead.

Urban Foraging

By May 1, 2011
I am drawn to this raw urban landscape, which hovers between collapse and regeneration, decay and possibility.

The Un-Shock Doctrine

By May 1, 2011

Despite everything, Slavoj Žižek still believes the Idea of communism is the most appropriate for our end times of crises and monsters.

Nuclear Haze

By April 15, 2011

The world's first nuclear reactors were fast-tracked while hailed as an economic breakthrough. By the time the public knew the truth, the atomic myth was up and running. As the recent disaster in Japan reminds us, nature always has the last word.

There Is Hope – Make the Call

By April 15, 2011
I had hoped… for what? A game of Scrabble on the way down, or to get married, or at the very least to link hands with a serendipitous octet of fellow self-murderers–the drop had certainly looked big enough for such skydiving antics.

Molecularity

By April 15, 2011
bones mellowing from red to yellow, / and wanting to crack / each other open, suck each other / dry.

Of Mines and Men

By April 15, 2011

A from-the-ground report on how the tapping of Angola’s natural resources has kept the country a killing field, and made it one of the world’s most glaringly inefficient kleptocracies.

On the Fly: Robert Reich

By April 15, 2011
The former Secretary of Labor on the Great Recession, class warfare, and why President Obama must challenge right-wing distortions with a counter-narrative.

Childhood Reasons

By April 15, 2011

The new translation of Tagore's childhood memoir tells us much about the man who would later reshape Bengali literature and music (and chastise Mahatma Gandhi), says Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen.

The Accidental Tagore

By April 15, 2011

On the 150th anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore's birth, Amit Chaudhuri discusses the Nobel Laureate's life and poetry, his embrace of chance in the creation process, and his meetings with Albert Einstein.

Glenn Greenwald on WikiLeaks & Establishment Media

By April 9, 2011
 Since the technology to reveal government secrets won’t go away, no matter what is done to WikiLeaks, the government wants to make you afraid you’ll end up like Bradley Manning if you blow the whistle. So said Greenwald at the National Conference for Media Reform in Boston on Friday.

Harvest

By April 1, 2011

I'm younger than anyone here, and I have read // Books about bees, but I've only been stung twice.

The Straight Dope

By April 1, 2011

David Simon would be happy to find out that The Wire was hyperbolic and ridiculous, and that the “American Century” is still to come. But he's not betting on it.

Dear Yale

By April 1, 2011
Don’t think of me angry. Think of me as I am, standing at the mailbox on a sunny September mid-morning, a light breeze kicking up a swirl of dust and aster leaves around my legs.

Ensaio (Rehearsal)

By April 1, 2011
The maracatu festival becomes an allegory of life itself, in which young and old follow the inevitable rhythm of the dance and the game.

Mapping the Rift

By April 1, 2011

On the verge of arrest, a Palestinian lawyer and author recounts the flight from arrest of an ancestor active during the Ottoman years [an excerpt from A Rift in Time (2011), published by OR Books].

La Estocada

By April 1, 2011
The famed American matador on Catalonia’s impending bullfighting ban, the art of killing well, and her friendships with Hemingway and Norman Mailer.

Jake Whitney: Libya is Just

By March 28, 2011
 While it is nearly impossible to justify killing, all evidence suggests that more people will die if the United States doesn’t intervene. So as long as this campaign—this war—is fought to help the Libyan people, and not to advance U.S. interests, it is a just one.

Tom Engelhardt: The Worst That Could Happen

By March 22, 2011
 “And so, for decades, that part of my childhood remained the dark but largely forgotten underside of the golden 1950s. I never thought I'd want it back, but with six nuclear plants threatening to melt down in Fukushima, Japan, I find that I do.”

Justin Alvarez: Barry Hannah in the Oxford American

By March 17, 2011
 The March issue of the Oxford American is dedicated to the fierce Mississippi-bred writer and professor Barry Hannah, who died a little over a year ago on March 1, 2010. In a video shot by writer and friend John Oliver Hodges on his time spent as Hannah’s right-hand man, the two revisit some of Hannah’s old ghosts.

Crossing Erez

By March 15, 2011

During 2005, while our author lived in East Jerusalem and worked in Ramallah and the Gaza Strip, he moved through at least four checkpoints every day. This is what that was like.

The Price of Escape

By March 15, 2011
As soon as the maid was out of earshot, his uncle said: “I’ve paid a lot to get you a visa for Panama and Guatemala. At another time, this would be called a bribe. It may take a month, maybe more, to get them.”

Selmeyyah

By March 15, 2011
Egyptian novelist and activist Ahdaf Soueif on when she knew the revolution would succeed, the role Al Jazeera and social networking played, and the irresponsible reporting on Lara Logan’s attack.

Joel Whitney: Mac McClelland’s Burma Refugee Diary

By March 15, 2011
By Joel Whitney Mac McClelland arrived in Thailand in July 2006 to teach English, with little knowledge of the Karen crisis that would envelop her for the next six weeks. Currently a reporter at Mother Jones, McClelland’s testament to that crisis became her riveting debut, For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question: A Story […]

The Idea of North

By March 15, 2011
For ages, the idea of the North has fascinated scientists, adventurers, writers, and artists. In 2008 our award-winning photographer spent three months in the Yukon territory documenting the people and scenic beauty.

Runner

By March 15, 2011

Would you run in the Olympics for the country that occupied your birth country and refused to allow its independence? The subject of a forthcoming documentary on his contested homeland, the Western Sahara.

Robert Reich: The Real News on Jobs

By March 7, 2011
 Conservative economists have it wrong. The underlying problem isn’t that so many Americans have priced themselves out of the global/high-tech labor market. It’s that they’re getting a smaller and smaller share of the pie.

Iman Said: No Exception for Oman

By March 2, 2011
 “[Omanis] are proud of their country’s safety and security and they do not want to ruin that…What they do not know is that what they are doing is a kind of hypocrisy. It is as if you know that your child is sick but you do not want to admit it because you are afraid of what others would say.”

Anonymous from Libya: Daughter of a Martyr

By March 1, 2011
 “[Qaddafi] and his gangsters are trembling. He has nothing to do but to expose his very true personal Libyan Mafia to the world. The more cities he loses control over, the more he threatens and the more blood he adds to his hands.”

Capturing the Queen

By March 1, 2011
The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer discusses her latest book on Cleopatra that looks beyond tired mythologies surrounding the powerful queen.

Lamu Squat

By March 1, 2011
They fix passage across the channel for three hundred shillings; Meroe haggles. The motorboats have long since skimmed into the dusk, the passengers smiling and laughing at the platitudes of the Lamuans.

Plasticize Me

By March 1, 2011

Will recent advances in human tissue preservation change the way we think about bodies, death, God… and China?

Trans-Formative Change

By March 1, 2011
America’s first openly transgender law professor on the power of zines, the sacrifice social movements require, and the limits of legal reform.

Iman Said: Report From Oman

By February 28, 2011
 If we have learned anything from the revolts that have spread all over the Arab world, it is that using violence against the protesters makes them more united and determined to get what they came for.

Anonymous in Libya: Stay in Your Home, You Will Be Safe

By February 27, 2011
 “The world needs to know that what’s happening in Libya is no longer a response to protest; it’s genocide. Qaddafi’s forces shoot civilians from ambulances using anti-aircraft guns! People are struggling against heavy weapons with stones. And now Qaddafi has once again showed up with more bloodcurdling threats to turn Libya into ‘embers of fire.’”

Anonymous from Libya: Two Reports

By February 24, 2011
 Our anonymous source in Tripoli reports on the latest violence, and asks, “At what point does it become reasonable for international intervention in Libya to stop the butchering of protesters?”

Robin Yassin-Kassab: Cockroach Rule

By February 23, 2011
 Unlike the uprising in Egypt, the revolutionaries in Libya have not been protected by TV cameras. In fact, they have faced the most extreme, Israeli-style violence since the first day.

Stephanie Staal: Taking Feminism’s Pulse

By February 22, 2011
  A conversation with Staal, author of the new book Reading Women: How the Great Books of Feminism Changed My Life, on Susan Faludi’s accusations in Harper’s of feminism’s ritual matricide, the health of the movement, and whether Sarah Palin should be attaching herself to it.

Robin Yassin-Kassab: Syria Speeding Up

By February 21, 2011
 Egypt is closer to Syrian hearts than it seems on the map. If a democratic, non-sectarian Egypt reclaims its regional role, profound change in Syria will be a matter of time. So the regime needs to get a move on.

Robin Yassin-Kassab: The Autumn of the Patriarch

By February 16, 2011
 Qaddafi thinks he’s a lady-killing revolutionary of Guevara proportions and a tyrant of the stature of Mao. At the same time, he thinks the people are in control of Libya’s destiny. And perhaps—we can hope after Tunisia and Egypt—he’s right.

To Conquer Her Land

By February 15, 2011
The few women in the Indian army are battling not only against their country’s enemies but also against poverty, patriarchy, and loneliness.

The Un-Victim

By February 15, 2011
In the wake of sedition threats by the Indian government, the writer and activist describes the stupidest question she gets asked, the cuss-word that made her respect the power of language, and the limits of preaching nonviolence.

Shoes for Napoleon

By February 15, 2011
Like every soldier he had deployed with, he would probably buy himself a new car, but for now, he bought his friends drinks and dinners and gifts as if it was Christmas and he was some lean and tan Santa Claus.

For a Coming Extinction

By February 15, 2011

The U.S. poet laureate, W.S. Merwin, discusses his role in the antiwar movement, the quagmire of U.S. military occupations, today’s extinction rate, and efforts to conserve nature on Maui.

Robin Yassin-Kassab: Arab Earthquake

By February 12, 2011
 “Arab Tunis rose up. Inspired by Tunis, mighty Egypt rose. Today American control over the Arab region is collapsing. Palestine faces a different future to the one it faced yesterday. The Arab nation is back.”

Sam Kerbel: Memoir Wars

By February 11, 2011
 Neil Genzlinger of the NYT charges that the contemporary memoir is dull, “unexceptional,” and evidence of “the current age of oversharing.” Maybe. But what about speaking for the unheard?

Justin Alvarez: “Imported from Detroit”

By February 8, 2011
 Just as the NFL championship trophy returned to its roots with Vince Lombardi returning to Green Bay for the first time in 14 seasons, another standout of last night’s Super Bowl broadcast reminded the world where manufacturing innovation was invented — Detroit.

Rebecca Bates: The Many Faces of the AWP Attendee

By February 7, 2011
 The AWP conference is over, and we are all happy to get back to our regularly scheduled programming. But just in case you didn’t get to spend a lot of time gawking at others, here’s a small people-watching checklist, complete with (not-so-covertly taken) photos.

Robin Yassin-Kassab: Bloodbath

By February 2, 2011
 “I will make a prediction: if this revolution fails, America will face an unprecedented wave of Arab anger, and Egypt will be plagued by violence from now on.”

Memoir Manifesto

By February 1, 2011

Guest editor Deb Olin Unferth offers insights into the art of the memoir and introduces the present and future stars of the genre.

Amardeep Singh: Poetry in the Protests: Egypt and Tunisia

By February 1, 2011
 One of the aspects of the recent uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia that has not received much attention—not surprisingly—is the role Arabic poetry has played. At times like these, the right poetry and song doesn’t merely describe how people are feeling; it can actually be an intensifier that helps a protest spread and solidify.

Snapshots

By February 1, 2011

Homeschoolers like to think of themselves as patriotic trailblazers, but what it really means is they don’t teach their kids about sex, evolution, or global warming.

Self Walking Backward

By February 1, 2011

When my mother had her second cancer operation, I was in Africa. Gita was angry, because I hadn’t come back from my trip.

Robin Yassin-Kassab: Sovereignty

By January 31, 2011
 Egypt’s Friday of Rage was a beautiful revolutionary moment. While uncertainty remains, that energy has been unleashed…and it’s not about to jump back in the bottle.

How Crazy Was Loughner?

By January 27, 2011
 That Jared Loughner is so crazy we can’t look for motive is the same story Bush shilled after September 11. But files found on Loughner’s computer suggest he won’t be getting off on an insanity plea.

Video: Aung San Suu Kyi will review sanctions on Burma

By January 24, 2011
 In a new interview with Ann Curry, Burmese opposition icon Aung San Suu Kyi signals her party will finally reexamine the efficacy of sanctions. Guernica editor Joel Whitney explains why Burma sanctions, and sanctions in general, may soon become obsolete.

Erik Raschke: The Great American Novelist

By January 23, 2011
  With all the anger in America right now, why have our well-crafted words seemingly fallen on deaf ears? Is it that we have nothing to say or that what we say is no longer connected to the blood flowing through our country? Or is it even simpler: the modern American novel is no longer about debate, but about appeasing an audience.

Alex Halperin: Coming Home From Prison

By January 21, 2011
 Since leaving prison, Burgess’s marketable skill stabilized her while she explored her options. She’s always talking about what’s next. Still, she’s learned that her past won’t just disappear.

Ira Chernus: Obama Trapped by Myth

By January 20, 2011
 Religious historian Ira Chernus discusses the myths people tell to make sense of the chaos of their lives—myths of the enemy, myths of security—and how these have ensnared Washington itself.

Tom Engelhardt: In the Crosshairs, Tuscon-Kabul

By January 18, 2011
 Six are dead in Tucson, and the country is outraged. Sixteen are killed in Kabul, and there’s nary a thought for the deceased. Tom Engelhardt discusses how Americans are quick to protect their own, but care little for Afghan innocents.

General Anopheles

By January 15, 2011

Ending malaria in Africa any time soon is nearly hopeless. And in trying, Jeffrey Sachs and Bill Gates may be doing more harm than good.

The Holdouts

By January 15, 2011
For four hundred years, the Raramuri have resisted the modern world. New pressures are separating them from their past.

Rosa de la Rosas

By January 15, 2011
Rosa is tired of talk, tired of being tired. Armed guards stand outside to keep intruders out, or las muchachas in.

Juan Cole: The First Middle Eastern Revolution since 1979

By January 14, 2011
 The Tunisian Revolution is potentially more consequential than the Iranian one was thirty years ago. Yet, even with an alliance of frustrated BA holders, professionals, workers, farmers, progressives and Muslim activists, it remains to be seen if little Tunisia is the start of something, or one more false dawn.

Beacon Broadside: Revising Huck Finn, Revising History

By January 6, 2011
 The Classic American Novel, Huckleberry Finn has weathered centuries of controversy. The latest one—removing the '‘n’-word to make the book appeal to educators—is a well-intentioned mistake that changes the author's intention and the role of academics to wrestle with difficult issues.

Robert Reich: The Shameful Attack on Public Employees

By January 5, 2011
 The Republican version of class warfare is to pit private-sector workers against public servants. They’d rather set average working people against one another. (And they also would rather you didn’t know they want to cut taxes on the rich even more.)

Eline Gordts: Denmark’s fight in Afghanistan

By January 4, 2011
 Can there be a “humanitarian mission” where fighters are bored and disillusioned when a patrol doesn’t involve a fight, the taking of possibly innocent lives? What security does a NATO-mission bring, if villagers are too scared to talk to the security forces for fear of repercussions from the Taliban?

Robert Reich: The Big Lie

By January 3, 2011
 George Orwell once explained that when a public is stressed and confused, a Big Lie told repeatedly can become the accepted truth. Only the President has the bully pulpit. But will he use it to tell the Big Truth?

Rebecca Bates: Q&A with J. Malcolm Garcia

By January 2, 2011
 The writer of “Bed 18”, one of this issue’s features, talks about reporting on self-immolation in a country where years of war and poverty have made grief and suffering “so common that loss no longer evokes shock.”

Bed 18

By January 1, 2011

Our author was in Afghanistan to report on women who set themselves on fire to protest their social status. Then it got personal.

Nearer to Truth than History

By January 1, 2011
Reza Aslan on his groundbreaking anthology, the failure to build bridges between the West and Middle East, how poets can help, and the internet can’t.

Doing Everybody

By January 1, 2011

Two star novelists on bringing back wrong and right, micro and macro writing, and David Foster Wallace.

Kill

By January 1, 2011

June’s winter, ivory-rinsed blue, // a wild dog tugs a sock of skin /

down an impala’s stick-leg penciling skyward

Rec Room: Patrick Burns: On the Bowery

By December 27, 2010
 On the Bowery does a piercing job of making the audience feel the misery of street life in nineteen fifties New York. Though the dehumanizing effects of homeless and poverty are no longer seen as frequently on today’s Bowery, the film still reminds us of all those who are left behind.

Nilanjana Roy: A Quiet Rant on the Assange Case, and a Response to Kavita Krishnan

By December 22, 2010
 “I get that discussing the nuances of consensual sex versus non-consensual sex might seem like a luxury, when every week brings its raft of gang rapes, call-center rapes, caste-conflict-inspired rapes, the casual rapes of sex workers, the routine rape of Dalit women, or women in conflict zones to our attention. But the right to give or withdraw one’s consent is not a small thing.”

Guernica’s Pushcart Prize Nominees

By December 21, 2010
 For thirty-five years, editors from small lit mags and book presses have nominated six authors—be they poets, fiction writers, essayists, etc.—for the Pushcart Prize. We are one such lit mag, and we are thrilled to announce our nominees.

Care

By December 15, 2010
A special issue: flash fiction from four favorite writers.

Murder Music

By December 15, 2010

Jamaica’s dancehall music is being blamed for the country’s violent attacks on gays. But there are many who don’t see the music as homophobic, only the battle cry of a changing nation. Part 2 of 2.

Snake Story

By December 15, 2010

my father has always had / a fear of being swallowed / whether by a large reptile or the earth

Hero

By December 15, 2010

Early Zionist writing evoked the tragic male hero, bound by the cruel destiny of his people and himself. It’s true of many contemporary works, including Kushner and Spielberg’s Munich.

The Wrong Question

By December 15, 2010
Journalist Joshua Phillips on the left media’s standard torture story, untrained soldiers making it up as they go, and becoming a suicide hotline.

Atrophic Existence

By December 15, 2010
A group exhibition which features emerging contemporary artists whose work harmoniously intertwines around the subject of urban decay.

Lewis Lapham: Domesticated Deities: About Messiahs Come to Redeem Our Country, Not Govern It (and Don’t Forget Marilyn and Elvis and Jackie O and Diana and Oprah and Brangelina and David Hasselhoff)

By December 13, 2010
 “On passing a newsstand these days I think of funeral parlors and Tutankhamen’s tomb. The celebrities pictured on the covers of the magazines line up as if in a row of ceremonial grave goods, exquisitely prepared for burial within the tomb of a democratic republic that died of eating disco balls.”

Suzanne Menghraj: Where There’s Smoke

By December 3, 2010
 A lot of the money that drives the Mexican drug trafficking that has led to the deaths of over twenty-eight thousand people since 2006 is in marijuana. Most of the marijuana grown in Mexico winds up in the United States.

Public Disinterest

By December 1, 2010

The U.S. postal service is struggling for survival and broadcast airwaves feed hate. How two key information commons, “owned” by citizens, have dammed the flow of communication and birthed Rush Limbaugh.

Murder Music

By December 1, 2010

Jamaica’s dancehall music is being blamed for the country’s violent attacks on gays. But there are many who don’t see the music as homophobic, only the battle cry of a changing nation. Part 1 of 2.

Norman Solomon: WikiLeaks: Demystifying “Diplomacy”

By November 29, 2010
 In a democracy, people have a right to know what their government is actually doing. In a pseudo-democracy, a bunch of fairy tales from high places will do the trick. What kind of “national security” can be built on duplicity from a government that is discredited and refuted by its own documents?

Rebecca Bates: Q&A with Wuer Kaixi

By November 22, 2010
When Wuer Kaixi was twenty-one years old, he became known the world over as the student who scolded Premier Li Peng while wearing a hospital gown in Tiananmen Square. Here, he speaks about the Chinese government’s treatment of Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Peace Prize and the mode of appeasement that has dictated the international community’s relationship with China since Tiananmen.

Dan Margolis: From Fatwa to Jihad

By November 17, 2010
 The political right are not the only ones to embrace the “clash of civilizations” between the West and the Islamic world—the left has done so as well through it’s doctrine of multiculturalism.

The Toad

By November 15, 2010

Will protecting an endangered toad trump Tanzania’s need for energy and development?

Iftar at Isabelle’s

By November 15, 2010
We go outside and into the city, which is a messy conglomerate of heat and waste. We would breathe air if there were any, but instead there are varieties of emissions and so we breathe those instead.

Updike Redux

By November 15, 2010
In a previously unpublished interview, John Updike talks about Nabokov and his other literary heroes, why he wrote a book about a terrorist, and why he never expected to be a novelist.

A Kind of Flag-Planting

By November 15, 2010
On the heels of her second novel and fourth work of fiction, Bender considers magic and math, craft and discipline, and the influence of other writers and artists on her work.

Robert Reich: The Failure of the G-20 Summit

By November 15, 2010
 It’s always nice to talk about international cooperation, but the truth is much more needs to be done to ease tensions that are moving the global economy closer to the brink of outright protectionism. The key responsibility falls to China and America—both internationally and domestically.

Dust

By November 15, 2010

I want to tell you, I have nothing / but respect for your ribcage

David Bacon: Public Workers: A Visual Reality Check

By November 10, 2010
In California cities like San Jose, voters this election passed ballot measures to weaken the retirement system for public workers. These photographs in this post are meant to inspire some obvious questions. Can people do this work, if they’re then cast adrift once they're too old? What would happen to all of us if they didn't do these jobs?

Wuer Kaixi: A Prize for all Chinese in the Struggle

By November 7, 2010
 For too long, appeasement has been the name of the game when it comes to dealing with China. The Norwegians changed that on Friday by saluting Liu Xiaobo with the Nobel Peace Prize, which has eluded everyone engaged in the struggle for a less repressive China.

Event: Turning Tides: A Symposium on Diasporic Literatures

By November 5, 2010
 Tomorrow, November 6th, Fordham University at Lincoln Center is hosting Turning Tides: A Symposium on Diasporic Literatures, a creative and scholarly conference that will highlight three different legacies of diaspora in the United States: Haiti, The Philippines and Puerto Rico.

Irena Gross: The Morning After

By November 4, 2010
 The morning of Wednesday, November 3rd was a sad one for this author. So, she went for a jog in Prospect Park, a space that she calls “an image of democracy.”

Deepening into Humanness

By November 1, 2010

Guest Editor Emily Fragos introduces six poets who write about family incarnations—Matthew Zapruder, Cynthia Cruz, Gabriel Fried, Mark Wunderlich, Lynn Melnick, and Jennifer Franklin.

Molotov

By November 1, 2010

Got my enzymes, a nickel bag of / Electrolytes. My entire life, / I’ve been waiting for this.

The Wrong Side

By November 1, 2010
The unrepentant revolutionary poet and Beat godfather, now 91, looks back at friendships with Ginsberg, Pablo Neruda, Fidel, and the Sandinistas—and asks when The Nation will publish his next poem.

La Violencia

By November 1, 2010

From Tijuana east, Ed Vulliamy traces a violent drug war, spreading repression condoned by the U.S., a wall that separates family members, a water supply shut off, and the worship of Holy Death. From his new book.

Fish With The King

By November 1, 2010

As Gulf fishermen are forced to work for the oil company that destroyed their livelihoods, who will train Louisiana’s next generation to fish?

That Woman

By October 15, 2010

That woman who spreads her legs, / who is beaten, who cannot hold / her grief or her drink. / Don’t become that woman.

Separations

By October 15, 2010
A series of studio images focusing on disused electronics, as well as flora and fauna.

The Missing

By October 15, 2010

Amina Janjua and the search for thousands of disappeared Pakistanis swept up in the U.S. and Pakistan’s “War on Terror”—in 15 scenes.

Guernica Celebrates 6!

By October 14, 2010
 Join Guernica for an evening filled with food, drinks, music, readings, auctions, celebrities, honorees, and more fun than should be allowed at a benefit.

Asylum

By October 1, 2010

The grand mental institutions of the nineteenth century long ago emptied of all inhabitants, but their skeletons still mark our psychic and physical landscape.

Blood Without Guts

By October 1, 2010
Why fight wars our president doesn’t believe in and we can’t pay for? asks retired colonel and military historian Andrew Bacevich.

Droning On

By October 1, 2010

From stepped up drone attacks, backsliding on torture, the Afghan surge, has Obama doubled down on Bush’s bets? Editor Joel Whitney interviews Tariq Ali on his new book. Recorded live at Asia Society.

Rebecca Bates: Guernica and the Gender Debate

By September 29, 2010
In the wake of Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner’s beef with the New York Times over their star treatment of Franzen’s Freedom, we at Guernica Mag decided to review our own stats to see how we stack up in the male-female literary battle.

Watch: Fatima Bhutto on Democracy Now

By September 28, 2010
Last Friday, Guernica interviewee Fatima Bhutto appeared on Democracy Now to talk about her memoir and the devastation following the floods in Pakistan, a disaster that she says “ought to have been contained [and] could have been contained.”

Robert Reich: Republicanism as Social Darwinism

By September 28, 2010
Herbert Hoover and Andrew Mellon thought their economic policies would purge the rottenness out of the system. Instead, it purged morality out of the system and lead to strife for millions of Americans. Current Republican House leader John Boehner could do the same.

David Bollier: Liberate the Music!

By September 19, 2010
Why is Beethoven’s music still locked behind copyrights? Musopen attempts to release our shared cultural heritage to the world without restraints by freeing public-domain music from centuries ago.

Untitled

By September 15, 2010

because I hate your every-now-and-then anthems, / because I hate the smell of your socks in the stone mihrabs.

Dam Dilemma

By September 15, 2010

Opportunistic speculators are eying Nepal’s burgeoning hydropower potential. Does wealth or woe lie ahead for the poverty-stricken nation?

Video: An Interview with Xiaoda Xiao

By September 15, 2010
When artist Xiaoda Xiao was twenty years old, he was sent to a forced labor prison in his native China for defacing a portrait of Chairman Mao. This post features a documentary short of Xiao’s reflections on his experiences in labor prison.

Big Money

By September 15, 2010

We played Steal the Bacon / and explored our unmentionables /
behind the gazebo

Mark Winne: How Do You Like Your Eggs? Industrial or Local?

By September 8, 2010
If food corporations rule, how do we avoid the mischief that our industrial food system is heir to? Could the days of an all-powerful national Food Czar be far off? Clean hands on sanitized cutting boards, building our own chicken coops, and bringing our voices loud and clear to city hall offer us a distinctly brighter set of possibilities.

Wolf in the Heart

By September 1, 2010
The historian and departing Newsweek editor on how he (like Remnick and Keller) caught war fever after 9/11, the obsession with being a man, and how his dad glowed in Navy whites.

Norman Solomon: A Speech for Endless War

By September 1, 2010
On the last night of August, the president used an Oval Office speech to boost a policy of perpetual war. With his commitment to war in Afghanistan, President Obama is not only on the wrong side of history. He is also now propagating an exculpatory view of any and all U.S. war efforts.

Travel

By September 1, 2010

Nobel Prize-nominee Bei Dao uses travel as a metaphor for life.

Torture of Women

By September 1, 2010
From Sumerian creation myths to Amnesty International reports, a silent consensus allows violence to be state-sanctioned and eternally mythologized.

Recovery Mission

By September 1, 2010

After she was raped in the Navy, Maricela Guzman survived an abusive marriage, PTSD, and an attempted suicide. Now she’s fighting to make sure it won’t happen to other women.

Guernica to Publish Winner of the ILP International Literature Award

By September 1, 2010
Two years ago, the Secretary of the Swedish Academy that decides the Nobel Prize claimed that American literature had become too insular. The folks at ILP and Guernica are looking for any work that “broadens the landscape of North American literature outside of the borders of North America” to negate these charges of insularity.

David Bollier: The Privatization of Yoga

By August 25, 2010
The sooner we acknowledge that we live in the Age of Enclosure, the sooner we can develop the legal mechanisms for protecting that which belongs to all of us. This includes the latest endangered resource: yoga.

Mark Floegel: A Review of Poisoned for Profit

By August 23, 2010
How can a nation that has attained so much and claims such moral high ground in human rights and social values simultaneously pump out poisons that have sent American rates of birth defects, childhood cancer, asthma, and diabetes on an ever-rising trajectory?

David Bollier: The Power of Open Data: How Large-Scale Sharing and Collaboration are Helping to Solve Medical Mysteries

By August 23, 2010
Science has always recognized the power of sharing in developing new knowledge, but the highly diverse research data on diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s is not easily shared. This post emphasizes how the most fruitful way forward is to pursue an “open source” approach that places the basic building-blocks of knowledge into the commons.

The Sidney Hillman Foundation Commends Guernica‘s Blog

By August 16, 2010
Khadija Sharife's “FIFA’s Love of Tax Havens”, which appeared exclusively on Guernica's blog, was the only article from an online-only or non-major media outlet to be mentioned as a “winner” in The Sidney Hillman Foundation's "Winners & Sinners" wrap-up.

Language of the Dead

By August 15, 2010
Could she break herself down to the bare necessities like they did? Food, water, work? What were her bare necessities?

A Not So Secret Ballot

By August 15, 2010

After two rounds of presidential voting, Colombia inaugurated “the warrior,” Juan Manuel Santos, last week. Did the country avoid the voter fraud so prevalent in Latin America? A from-the-ground report.

Egghead

By August 15, 2010

Then he remembered / That he couldn’t remember // If he had toes. What a relief.

An Unfortunate Discharge

By August 15, 2010

When he was young and looking for a little direction, our writer turned to the Navy. There, he found many more questions than answers.

Stephen Puleo: Boston and the Irish, on the Anniversary of the Ursuline Convent Riots

By August 12, 2010
On August 11 and 12, 1834, a riot fueled by anti-Catholic fervor resulted in the burning of an Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in what is now Somerville. In this excerpt from A City So Grand: The Rise of an American Metropolis, Boston 1850-1900, Stephen Puleo examines the height of Irish immigration to the city in the years following the riot, and the deeply anti-Catholic and anti-Irish discrimination the new arrivals faced.

We Are One

By August 9, 2010

August 9 is International Day of the World’s Indigenous People. With an indigenous uprising last month in Brazil, Survival International’s Joanna Eede celebrates the world’s first peoples in a new book.

Carlos A. Ball: What Judge Walker’s Ruling Tells Us About the Right’s Twenty-Year Campaign of Spreading Fear on Same-Sex Marriage

By August 6, 2010
It is one thing to say, during a political campaign, that same-sex marriage constitutes a threat to society or to the family or to children. It is another thing to back up those claims through the introduction of specific evidence in a court of law. In this post, the controversy over Proposition 8 is a battle of facts versus nonfacts.

Daniel Moss: Historic Expansion of Human Rights: The UN Declares the Right to Clean Drinking Water and Sanitation

By August 3, 2010
After more than a decade of grassroots organizing and lobbying, the global water justice movement achieved a significant victory when the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to affirm “the right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as a human right that is essential for the full enjoyment of life and all human rights.”

Birth of a Salesman

By August 1, 2010

In a new book about the global war on terror, Amitava Kumar shows how criminal guilt has been sacrificed to the political need to haul in suspects. The result? Through crude character assassination, guilt is essentially fabricated after the arrest.

The Frugal Superpower

By August 1, 2010

From his new book, Michael Mandelbaum lays out the challenge of the U.S.’s activist foreign policy, including an expensive war on terror, in an age of economic retraction and pending entitlements.

It Wasn’t a War

By August 1, 2010
The Israel critic and Holocaust heir on the “Gaza massacre,” the Goldstone Report, the public turn against Israeli policy, and the difference between “of” and “in.”

A Woolly Problem

By August 1, 2010

More than 100 years ago, scientists were concerned about global warming. What they forecast is happening, only faster.

Landslide

By August 1, 2010
The Soviets were a menace to Georgian poet Titsian Tabidze’s generation. As his daughter and granddaughter recount, the legacy continues.

The Lucky One

By August 1, 2010

...there / was always a lucky one, who carried with him / the mistakes of others, what a burden / it must have been that pushed him down, / but he was pleased by all this pushing.

Eighteen

By August 1, 2010
An Israeli photographer captures Arab men and women at a crucial turning point in their lives.

Guernica’s Top 5 Whistleblowers

By July 30, 2010
In light of last week’s act of epic whistleblowing, Guernica presents its top five favorite whistleblowers and leak enablers, all of whom have appeared in the magazine in some capacity.

Danielle Ofri: Americans by Choice

By July 29, 2010
“Somehow, it seems to have been forgotten that every American is or was an immigrant. Most of our grandparents and great-grandparents came here ‘illegally’ because immigrants were never particularly welcomed. But those generations of “Americans by Choice” built up our society and economy in a manner that has come to define America.”

Rec Room: Rachel Louise Ensign: Tinkers

By July 22, 2010
Unique, captivating, and a measure more magical than most other contemporary novels, Tinkers is a finely rendered tale of a father and son who exist mostly in separate, but twin, narratives that reflect their tragic inability to connect with one another.

Alex Halperin: Summer in the City

By July 19, 2010
Last fall, Keith Nelson, co-founder of the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, and his friend Rob Hickman had been tooling around with their unicycles when they decided to ride over the Williamsburg Bridge. Their journey inspired them to unicycle over every bridge in the city.

Ears

By July 15, 2010
Having four ears could be a sign of the Apocalypse. Or just good for selling a t-shirt.

Victoria Kent

By July 15, 2010

A few of the prison reforms / you wrestled into implementation // in Madrid, will take root /

in the rest of the world

Built on Sand

By July 15, 2010
Egypt’s museums’ grandiose displays reveal and mold the identity of this most ancient of countries.

By Bread Alone

By July 15, 2010

Some Pakistanis have begun blaming Afghan immigrants for bringing “their” war into Pakistan—one Afghan baker’s story of harassment, corruption, and exile.

Adopting Guatemalan

By July 15, 2010

International adoption is not always the unambiguous act of altruism it might seem. In Guatemala, it may be creating orphans.

Guernica at Park-Lit 2010

By July 15, 2010
Wednesday, July 21, 6:30 P.M. Guernica will be participating in the Park-Lit reading series at Union Square Park, and will feature non-fiction by Joshua Kors, poetry by Terese Svoboda, and fiction by Alexander Chee.

Jane Fulton Alt’s “Crude Awakening”

By July 14, 2010
Alt’s project is like a series family portraits gone wrong. Pregnant women, children, the elderly all find themselves casualties of the oil spill, their bodies drenched in the stuff, confusion and feelings of betrayal stretched across their faces.

Xiaoda Xiao: Prison Paintings

By July 12, 2010
Artist Xiaoda Xiao spent seven years in a forced labor prison in his native China for defacing a portrait of Chairman Mao. He completed following works to accompany the release of his new book.

Khadija Sharife: FIFA’s Love of Tax Havens

By July 6, 2010
Although the Swiss parliament has allowed FIFA to keep their non-profit status, the international soccer organization will certainly be cashing in during the 2010 World Cup, thanks to the set of financial conditions that they impose upon all host countries

Living with the Enemy

By July 1, 2010

Applying the ideas of Holocaust survivor Jean Améry to present day Rwanda, our author argues that reconciliation after genocide is just another form of torture.

Oil and Ash

By July 1, 2010

I understand this economically, and I’d rather not / mention the resemblance to prostitution, but when I open my / mouth it also fills with something called sky

Close-Up

By July 1, 2010
The photorealist painter on how art collided with his learning disability, his first paintings after paralysis, and why you shouldn’t think he’s an asshole.

Rachel Louise Ensign: South of the Border Goes Into the Fire

By June 30, 2010
In last Friday’s New York Times, Steven Holden’s review of the new film South of the Border was accompanied by a piece alleging that the film is full of “mistakes, misstatements and missing details.” Filmmakers Oliver Stone, Tariq Ali, and Mark Weisbrot issued a biting rebuttal.

Captive

By June 15, 2010
The former prisoner of the Colombian FARC on life in the jungle, coming to forgive, and Emmanuel, her son born in captivity.

Obama’s War

By June 15, 2010

The esteemed historian and novelist on how there is only one path for the United States in Afghanistan: withdrawal.

Seeds of Suicide

By June 15, 2010
Before BP destroyed habitats and livelihoods in the Gulf, Monsanto landed in India. A filmmaker on the time of the GM cotton suicides, and what was learned.

Fighting Flags

By June 15, 2010

A year after the Green Movement in Iran (and the day after Flag Day in the United States), an Iranian-American artist with 44 flags wonders where to call home.

Fighting Flags, a Slideshow

By June 15, 2010
A year after the Green Movement in Iran (and the day after Flag Day in the United States), an Iranian-American artist with 44 flags wonders where to call home. A slideshow

Aviva Chomsky: My U.S. Passport

By June 7, 2010
We're living in a global apartheid. First World countries shut themselves off to travelers, while assuming that their own citizens have the right to travel anywhere they choose.

Sanctioning Disaster

By June 1, 2010

The Burma expert defends aid, diplomacy, and “understanding” Burma’s dictators in order to improve human rights, sway softliners, and save lives.

Nixon’s Nose

By June 1, 2010

In Maoist China, a political prisoner feels his way through a Kafkaesque tableau of rumors, betrayal, interrogation, and execution.

In Angangueo

By June 1, 2010

Little boys in drifts of dulling orange were trying / to pack balls of wings to throw at each other; / she thought perhaps she wouldn't have children.

Kitintale Skateboarders

By June 1, 2010
Faced with a lack of concrete, these Ugandan skateboarders took matters into their own hands and built what was likely the first skatepark in East Africa.

Nazi Sheikhs

By May 15, 2010

The polemicist discusses Tariq Ramadan’s love of extremist sheikhs, Islamism’s ties to Hitler, and the intellectual confusion of liberal journalists.

Beautiful Funeral

By May 15, 2010

Tonight, you are thinking of heroin, / Of the boy who pulled you to his lips / In a blue room and whispered heroin / So close you could feel it on your face like a cloudburst.

Black Sheep and Exploding Turbans

By May 15, 2010

Europe is struggling to come to terms with its Muslim minority. What are the consequences of the intolerance and the violence for the continent and for literature? Paul Berman and a lauded panel chime in.

With Their Heads in Their Hands

By May 15, 2010

What does the disembodied head say to the world, to passersby, to itself? In the final essay in her six-part series, Menghraj discusses saints, icons, and presence of mind in the absence of brain.

Lost Edge

By May 15, 2010
The Mannerheim Line, built to protect Finland from the advances of the Soviet military avant-garde, now lies in ruins.

Chomsky Unplugged

By May 1, 2010

Chomsky discusses the unpeople in Iraq, the U.S., and Latin America, clever uses of the internet and international solidarity, and the conversion of a liberal dove to a principled anti-warrior.

Longing

By May 1, 2010

The mammoth and the dodo never saw it coming— / in the end, there is only the idea of species, like a chair / left swinging when the kids go in for lunch.

The Revolutionaries Try Again

By May 1, 2010
The one public phone near the Atarazana slums that didn’t filch your coins. At least not all of them. That soon after hordes were pilgrimaging to it and lining up to dial their departed.

The Diversity Test

By April 28, 2010

Why were there only 8 women on the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels of the Twentieth Century? Why is only 3% of the literature Americans read in translation?

Third Degree Burns

By April 15, 2010

It’s not navel-gazing MFA graduates who are killing literary fiction, says Jay Nicorvo. It’s blockbuster-hungry book editors and their habit of anticipating anticipations. A response to Ted Genoways in Mother Jones.

The 700 Club

By April 15, 2010
Skeptics cite 700 “scientists” who doubt global warming. Except few are climatologists. And Joseph Romm says they’re conducting the greatest disinformation campaign in history.

Shoes for Rent

By April 15, 2010
There was this six-foot-three very large man who lived with his cousin who had constant sore throats.

Among the Sámi

By April 15, 2010
I came here to understand the primal drive of the modern hunter, writes photographer Erica Larsen, and to find a people who, when the land speaks, can interpret its language.

Byrne, Baby, Byrne

By April 15, 2010

The rock icon on song cycles, cycling, and escaping the past with Imelda Marcos. And you may ask yourself, is this my beautiful new business model?

Lorraine Adams: Katyn

By April 12, 2010
This fall, when I was in Krakow, I paused at the Katyn memorial off Krakow’s main square. Today, I would be placing my flowers below the cross if I could.

Rec Room: David Xia: When All Else Fails

By April 7, 2010
In a time of health care reform and proposals to enhance consumer protection, this book shows us that the government has played and will continue to play an increasing role in all aspects of American life through its risk management policies.

John Czarnecki: Lost Treasures

By April 2, 2010
Historic preservation in the United States could face a significant financial blow if Congress passes the federal budget as proposed by the Obama Administration.

Quixotic

By April 1, 2010

Trying to translate a 400-year old masterpiece like Don Quixote into modern English would be folly, even Quixotic. But that’s what Edith Grossman does. A foolhardy essay for April Fools’ Day.

The Huckster

By April 1, 2010

Need to pick a good prison? Alan Ellis can help. Attorney, author, and self-publicist, Ellis is the creator of a new legal niche—one that places him in the time-honored American tradition of the fast-talking salesman.

Hate

By April 1, 2010

Days after the United States elected the first president of color, seven high school boys set out looking for Hispanics to beat up in a Long Island village. Spotting Marcelo, they surrounded him, punching and kicking, then stabbed him.

Fatima Bhutto: Notes on a Father’s Murder

By March 31, 2010
Bhutto was just fourteen when her father was gunned down outside her house. Her new book, Songs of Blood and Sword commemorates that death, tells her father's and her family's story, and blames Pakistan's current president for the crime.

Robert Reich: The Sham Recovery

By March 17, 2010
So what happens when the stimulus is over and the Fed begins to tighten again? Where will demand come from to get Main Street back, create jobs, raise middle class wages?

Three Tales

By March 15, 2010

The soldier had been trained in the language of the people he disappeared. This language was a language of things and their ghosts.

101 Billionaires

By March 15, 2010
At the beginning of 2008, the list of the richest Russians contained 101 billionaires; a magical number that for the time being will not be matched. These photographs document a very different Russia.

Sculpture

By March 15, 2010
These sculptures consider surface as structure to make visible the gritty imperfection of improvisation.

Labor Pains

By March 15, 2010

With 15 million men and women unemployed, our writer argues that the first step to fixing the job crisis is reimagining what Americans should be working on in the first place

Bohemian Rhapsody

By March 15, 2010

When the author gets bedbugs, she finds the toll on her body pales when compared with the toll on her beloved books and further, the threat the bugs pose to the bohemian spirit of New York City.

Photographs

By March 1, 2010
Guest edited by Shane Lavalette, these photographs are driven by the question, “What can a photograph be?”

Photographs

By March 1, 2010

Guest edited by Shane Lavalette, these photographs are driven by the question, “What can a photograph be?”

Generation, Gap

By March 1, 2010
The financial watchdog on the trouble the American middle class is in, who’s responsible for it, and what needs to be done to get out of it.

Chemotherapy

By March 1, 2010

The decomposing squirrel in the yard, / a plump sack. That night / I bled for hours, like a dumb animal.

The Acre

By March 1, 2010

After the death of his mother, a down-and-out writer realizes he needs a place, the kind you can’t buy, sell, deed, lease, or fence.

Overland

By March 1, 2010
They were still a good distance from Merzouga when the snake got a hold of him.

The Affliction

By February 15, 2010

Ricardo never knew what to say to Javier Castillo. Can you blame him? I wouldn’t know what to say to a man who could disappear.

The other part of truth

By February 15, 2010
Around Friday heaven arrives; they no longer supply / hell (it stays on the shelf too long), but I’ve got / hell at home, as well as heaven and the saints.

Sweet Nothings

By February 15, 2010
Civil rights champion David Mixner on his battle to end “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” why the February 2nd Congressional hearings were a bust, and how the policy fosters sexual harassment of women soldiers.

The Pleasure of Flinching

By February 15, 2010

While amateur Iraq war footage abounds, Nick Sautin asks if the trend represents our “right to view,” or is it porn made from leftovers of a world filming its self-destruction?

The War and the Roses

By February 15, 2010

Fourteen years after the end of Sarajevo’s besiegement during the Bosnian War, one writer finds a country uniquely capable of embracing the past while moving into the future.

Quality Street

By February 1, 2010

Sochienne called her a fat bourgeois, a dilettante dancing while Nigeria was failing, as though she could somehow solve the country’s problems by depriving herself of a manicure.

Zalzala

By February 1, 2010

His mother was about to say something, but all she could murmur was zalzala. Earthquake.

Suspension

By February 1, 2010
The soft light of the flames made her face seem prettier than it really was. Younger. She was a fixture in his life, a neutral—at most, perhaps, a reflective surface.

Exile on Any Street

By February 1, 2010
Are American readers insular, as the secretary of the Swedish Academy famously quipped? If so, why has immigrant fiction taken such a pivotal role in American letters? Irina Reyn hashes it out with lauded Bosnian author Aleksandar Hemon.

Simpatico

By February 1, 2010
Violet’s hair salon, Simpatico, was not far from the bus stop at Tafawa Balewa Square. It was on the way to Ikoyi, on a small road where artisans and craftsmen exhibited their works like miniature wooden villages, canoes, painted drums and rag dolls.

Surrender

By February 1, 2010
As Sunil stood in his backyard staring at the carcass of the small unidentifiable animal—a cross between a rat and a Chihuahua—he realized he was missing something important.

At the Lake

By February 1, 2010
The paintings are glimpses of a scene or fragments of a narrative. Similar to a memory, they are fictional constructions of significant moments.

Paintings

By February 1, 2010

These paintings focus on the American myth of the seeker, traveling alone through untouched landscapes in search of a revelatory experience of the divine.

Writers, Plain and Simple

By February 1, 2010

Women make up 80% of the fiction reading audience in this country. So why, guest fiction editor Claire Messud asks, are women authors so frequently left off the best-of lists, and left out of prestigious book prizes?

Luc Sante: Hooliganism and Literature

By January 27, 2010
David Carluccio produced the sort of thing that sits unsold in bookstores for years, and then suddenly is changing hands for four figures, and eventually cannot be obtained at all unless some major collector dies.

Less Than One

By January 13, 2010
These portraits of Russia’s outermost regions were shot in areas with a population density of less than one person per square kilometer.

Hobo Clown & Forest

By January 12, 2010

The claymation videos “Hobo Clown” and “Forest” capture otherworld buffoonery and the sublime, with music by the rock band Grizzly Bear.

Sin City (Part 2 of 2)

By January 10, 2010

How Dubai’s legal catch-22 transforms workers from around the world into de facto slave laborers without rights, days off, or pay.

On the Emancipation of Women

By January 10, 2010

Just as the 1800s were ripe for the abolition of slavery, this century will bring forces to bear on freeing women from violence, slavery, and oppression.

The Book of Shapur

By January 9, 2010
You take a vacation, you take a plane, and now this. You are running away from knowing this information. This is how things are these days.

Mars or Bust

By January 9, 2010

While the aerospace community waits for February when President Obama will announce the 2011 budget, effectively setting NASA’s direction for the near future, aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin agitates for a manned mission to Mars.

Hanging Garden

By January 6, 2010
They huddled / under the turning maples—almost / as if they were asking to be tried for something / they knew they must have done—

Worse than Cannibals

By January 1, 2010
America’s most famous whistleblower on his willingness to go to jail, the pervasiveness of presidential lying, and why war is prolonged.

Second Chance

By January 1, 2010
Our Max lived his life straight as an arrow, fast as lightning, no ifs, no buts, at least until now.

A Competition

By January 1, 2010
Nothing has changed with him in the last three days. But I grew up and received additional time that cannot be measured in years.

Sawdust Mountain

By January 1, 2010
These photographs are a melancholy love letter to the Northwest—a personal reflection of the region’s past, its hardscrabble identity, and the turbulent future it must navigate.

Homesick

By January 1, 2010

The Arab is so stunned, he doesn’t move. Just stands there with his certificate and his rusty key. Not breathing.

Two Poems

By January 1, 2010

To the country dug into our lives like a grave, / to the country etherized, and killed, / a sun rises from our paralyzed history / into our millennial sleep.

Moving

By January 1, 2010
After years in moving, you can tell by looking at the stuff. You can tell what it’s worth, if it’s cheap or valuable. And this guy—his stuff is worth billions, you see it immediately. Everything is as expensive as it gets, the furniture, the pictures, and the kitchen.

Norman Solomon: Flares in the Political Dark

By December 22, 2009
Mobilization of progressive movements to pressurize Obama in the White House and Democrats on Capitol Hill has always been essential. It hasn’t happened. Instead, among Democratic loyalists, reflexive support for the latest line from the administration has made it easier for Obama to move rightward.

John Sevigny: On Francisco Goya

By December 18, 2009
That Goya was a better painter than the earlier, more popular Peter Paul Rubens, or a more intelligent artist than Diego Velazquez, Michelangelo or Rembrandt hardly seems worth mentioning. That he created the Black Paintings, and The Dog, the most thoroughly modern piece in the group, in utter solitude, is food for thought in this age of Artistic Prostitution.

Robert Reich: Slouching Toward Health Care Reform

By December 17, 2009
In all likelihood, the White House and the Dems eventually will get a bill they can call "reform," but they will not be able to say with straight faces that the reform is a significant improvement over the terrible system we already have.

William Powers: Snowflakes in Copenhagen

By December 16, 2009
His Excellency Dasho Nado Rinchen of Bhutan outlined his country’s official national development focus: instead of the purely economic gross national product (GNP), he said, they track and pursue gross national happiness (GNH), a more holistic goal.

The Kids Are Alright

By December 15, 2009

A week removed from the Student Day protests, some media still claim the pace of change in Iran indicates weakness on the part of student protesters. But could it be a sign of political maturity?

William Powers: In the Thick of It

By December 14, 2009
It goes without saying that Obama and the other leaders who arrive in Copenhagen this week will have their fingers pressed upon the pulse of domestic political opinion. So in a very real sense, what happens here is up to you.

Norman Solomon: Mr. President, War Is Not Peace

By December 10, 2009
In Afghanistan, after 30 years under the murderous twin shadows of poverty and war, the only lifeline is peace. From President Obama, we hear that peace is the ultimate goal. But "peace" is a fixture on a strategic horizon that keeps moving as the military keeps marching.

Forecast For Today

By December 10, 2009
These twelve photographs reveal a sublime kind of beauty in the oddities and incongruities of the American highway.

Delta Farce?

By December 9, 2009

The MEND rebels of the Niger Delta are on a charm offensive, hosting press on fact-finding missions. Are they legitimate freedom fighters or environmental profiteers?

Robert Reich: The President’s Jobs Initiative Doesn’t Measure Up

By December 8, 2009
No president in modern times walks a tightrope as exquisitely as this one. His balance is a thing of beauty. But when it comes to this economy right now -- an economy fundamentally out of balance -- we need a federal government that moves boldly and swiftly to counter-balance the huge recessionary forces still at large.

Albania

By December 4, 2009
Back in our day there wasn’t anyone who didn’t know Albania / who didn’t know it was the bright light of European Socialism / or that the other bright light was us.

Waking Vrindavan

By December 2, 2009
This series of twenty photographs chronicles the Indian village of Vrindavan, which is believed by many Hindus to be the physical manifestation of heaven.

Caribou People

By December 2, 2009
On the eve of the United Nations’ Climate Change Conference, this series of photographs documents the lives of the Gwich’in, whose millennia-old culture is threatened by climate change.

Taking Care of Wall Street

By December 1, 2009
The Ohio Congresswoman (and the House’s longest-serving woman) on the vested interests in our broken system, how the bailout made things worse, and if she traded earmarks for donations.

The Meth Whisperer

By December 1, 2009
Nick Reding on his book Methland, why newspapers got the meth crisis wrong, and how the “middle of America” will pull itself out of a twenty-five year bust.

Two Short-Short Stories

By December 1, 2009
They hired a Yiddish-speaking detective, wagged fingers at the short man clutching a squashed hat, and told him to listen carefully to each performance, find the obscenities, please.

The Corset

By December 1, 2009

This is what you will not understand, / I tell this jelly, this fat crybaby girl.

Happy Valley Postcard

By December 1, 2009

Is this exuberant college town, named for defying the trends of the Great Depression, a clue into American violence, grief, and longing?

Seeing in Stereo

By December 1, 2009

When art sets out to deceive us, do we collude with just our eyes? The author visits an exhibit of trompe l’œil in Florence.

Norman Solomon: The Hollow Politics of Escalation

By November 30, 2009
At the core of enabling politics is inner space that's hollow enough to reliably cave under pressure. Typically, Democrats with antiwar inclinations weaken and collapse at push-comes-to-shove moments on Capitol Hill. The habitual pattern involves loyalty toward -- and fear of -- "the leadership."

Kristen French: Nabokov, Resurrected

By November 16, 2009
Written at the very end of Nabokov's life, The Original of Laura was interred, in notecard form, in a Swiss vault after Nabokov's death in 1977. Despite his instructions that his wife Vera burn it, she disobeyed. When she died, the decision fell to Nabokov's son Dmitri, who resolved last year to have it published.

Chomsky Half Full

By November 15, 2009

The controversial critic of U.S. foreign policy discusses his forthcoming book, the hypocrisy of neoliberalism, where he feels hopeful about democracy despite U.S. terrorism, and his friendship—okay, passing acquaintance—with Hugo Chavez and other “pink tide” presidents.

Norman Solomon: The War Stampede

By November 12, 2009
Disputes are raging within the Obama administration over how to continue the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. A new leak tells us that Washington's ambassador in Kabul, former four-star general Karl Eikenberry, has cautioned against adding more troops while President Hamid Karzai keeps disappointing American policymakers. This is the extent of the current debate within the warfare state.

Publish or Perish

By November 11, 2009
Publish or Perish started simply enough as a series of drawings investigating an amazing piece of machinery that I have marveled over since I was little.

Robin Yassin-Kassab: Our Shared Godstuff

By November 9, 2009
The fact that God uses human myths to talk to humans need not perturb the religious. "wa tilka al-amthal nadribuha lil-nas la'alahum yatafakiroon," says the Qur'an. "We rehearse these parables to people in order that they may think." From a religious perspective, the rehearsal of myths in sacred text is proof of God's understanding of human minds. And where do the myths arise from anyway? From unforgotten events, and from us, from our shared Godstuff.

Loving Cyrus

By November 6, 2009

You’ve learned it 34 years too late and it wrestles / with the story of Cyrus, /

the first man you’ve known with a woman’s / curved breast.

Red Ink

By November 3, 2009
On the day of the battle, General Yu woke up with a severe stiff neck.

Bolaño Inc.

By November 1, 2009

Roberto Bolaño is being sold in the U.S. as the next Gabriel García Márquez, a darker, wilder, decidedly un-magical paragon of Latin American literature. But his former friend and fellow novelist isn’t buying it.

Ice Houses

By November 1, 2009
The ice fishing shacks in the lake region of Maine and New Hampshire illustrate a primal narrative, one whose elements are shelter, food, warmth, and an ongoing battle against the caprices of nature.

The Other Gandhi

By November 1, 2009
“You’re saying that the other Gandhi was created in the editing? Is that what you’re trying to say to me?”

Murder the Queen

By November 1, 2009
Whatever you might say about the despicable nature of what I did, it was not as the press hints an act of desperation but one of hope.

A Rightful Share

By November 1, 2009
I want to tell you about my friend Kandan. Full name Kandan A/L Palanivel. Twenty years old. Handsome bastard.

Q & A With Matthea Harvey

By October 27, 2009
As Tin House Books makes its foray into children's book publishing with The Little General and The Giant Snowflake, Associate Editor Tony Perez sits down with the book's author, Kingsley Tufts winner and National Book Critics Circle Award nominee Matthea Harvey.

John Sevigny: On Roy DeCarava

By October 16, 2009
Roy DeCarava: chronicler of his own Harlem; eye-poet of the hardscrabble streets where he was born; master at printing subtle variations between black, pitch black, and pitch blacker.

Robert Reich: More Desperation from the Right

By October 16, 2009
The right-wing blogosphere seem interested in a talk I gave in September, 2007 to students in a political science class here at Berkeley, in which I played the role of a presidential candidate so politically incorrect and tone-deaf as to pummel every sacred cow in sight. In their desperation they have proven the whole point of my lecture.

Tom Engelhardt: War of the Worlds: London, 1898; Kabul, 2009

By October 9, 2009
President Obama, Afghan War commander Stanley McChrystal, and special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke should put aside their focus on counterinsurgency and counterterrorism and focus instead on H.G. Wells's 111 year-old novel, The War of the Worlds -- and on the thought that we might actually be the Martians of the twenty-first century

Under the Milanese Bureaucracy

By October 9, 2009

Public health care threw every conceivable obstacle at one pregnant American in Italy—bureaucracy, long waits, condescending doctors—yet she still favors the public option. Here’s her story.

Robert Reich: Specifically, What Should Be Done For Jobs?

By October 6, 2009
With the debt ceiling approaching and the gravitational pull of the 2010 elections increasing, the White House can't go back to Congress with a formal bill to enlarge the stimulus package. Here are four simple steps that would help small businesses, public schools, childrens' health, and average working people.

Healthcare on the Moon

By October 6, 2009
If this healthcare activist can deliver health care to the furthest corners of the developing world (and large swaths of the U.S.) why can’t Congress?

Loyal Opposition

By October 6, 2009

As Afghanistan erupts with redoubled violence, the author recounts the unbroken line of soldiers who have refused to serve (or repented their service) in every American war since the War of 1812.

There Will Be Blood

By October 1, 2009

Back in his native Sudan for the first time in years, the author observes the capital’s newfound oil wealth and argues that focusing narrowly on Darfur while ignoring the secessionist South could spell big trouble for all of Sudan.

Wise Latina

By October 1, 2009

The genre- and language-blending Mexican-American singer discusses “Indian-ness,” making music in the land of cultural chameleons, and says she may never be hip in the U.S. But her songs might be the most eloquent response yet to the likes of Joe “You Lie” Wilson.

Pieter Emily (Part 2 of 3)

By October 1, 2009

It was she who befriended Pieter. The things they did were not good things, not always. Once, they cut off a horse’s hoof for no reason at all, and left it on the steps of the church.

J.C. Hallman: The Disciplined Soul

By September 29, 2009
Seamus Heaney reminds us that a writer's life means "the disciplining of a habit of expression until it becomes fundamental to the whole conduct of a life." The Story About the Story is full of such-disciplined souls.

Robert Reich: The Public Option Lives On

By September 28, 2009
Despite resistance to it, the public option lives on. It's still in the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pension bill. It still headlines the House bills, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she's still committed to it. The latest Times/CBS poll shows 65 percent of the public in favor of it.

Tom Engelhardt: War Is Peace

By September 17, 2009
The way this country has grown used to its now seemingly unending wars and the immense, intense preparations for more of the same begs the question, Is America hooked on war?

Tom Engelhardt: The Washington Influence Machine

By September 16, 2009
Any administration arriving in Washington wanting to do anything these days walks into a blizzard of money from special interests, not to speak of the fact that the wind at its back, the campaign wind that got it there, was already blowing strong with similar contributions.

J.C. Hallman: Driving The Stake

By September 16, 2009
My squabbles with literary critics had to that point been only border skirmishes where a siege, a campaign, a war, was needed. I needed to drive a stake into the dead beating heart of the Beast, and leave him rotting in his coffin.

Coming to Amreeka

By September 15, 2009
The filmmaker on her feel-good (sort of) movie, Palestinians in the Windy City, and how personal experiences can trump political arguments.

Tom Engelhardt: Rebecca Solnit, 9/11’s Living Monuments

By September 11, 2009

Based on her new book, A Paradise Built in Hell, in which she offers a radically different vision of how people react to disasters -- they don't panic, they don't scream, they don't look helplessly to governments for aid, they begin to organize themselves -- Solnit offers us September 11th, 2001 through fresh eyes in a new moment in our history.

Norman Solomon: Men with Guns, in Kabul and Washington

By September 8, 2009
All over Kabul, men are tensely holding AK-47s; some are pointing machineguns from flatbed trucks. But the really big guns, of course, are being wielded from Washington, where administrative war-making thrives on abstraction. Day to day, it can be easy to order the destruction of what and who remain unseen.

Tom Engelhardt: Afghanistan by the Numbers: Measuring a War Gone to Hell

By September 8, 2009
Imagine for a moment what might have happened if Americans had decided to sink the same sort of money we have put into war efforts in Afghanistan -- $228 billion and rising fast -- the same "civilian surges," the same planning, thought, and effort (but not the same staggering ineffectiveness) into reclaiming New Orleans or Detroit, or into planning an American future here at home.

Drawing on History

By September 7, 2009

This month in Berlin, June Glasson exhibits her series The Foulest of Shapes, ink-and-wash drawings of women engaged in violence and revelry that pose complex questions about what it means to be a feminist artist today.

Shoot for the Legs

By September 7, 2009
The West’s first Tibetan Buddhist monk on his friend the Dalai Lama, the nuance of forceful resistance, and how Hitler could have been defeated without violence.

John Sevigny: Ansel Adams Strikes Out

By September 6, 2009
Ansel Adam's goal was no less than to save the American landscape through photographs -- no small endeavor -- and his efforts eclipsed those of 1,000 Al Gores. When he ventured outside of his comfort zone, though, into deeper political waters to document Japanese-American internment the result is closer to US Government propaganda.

Monarch & Mulberry

By September 4, 2009

After that, the sound of hammers and crows / through the open window, then somebody needs to // cut down that goddamn tree.

Pieter Emily (Part 1 of 3)

By September 4, 2009

Since Pieter Emily had been seen, a rash of trouble had begun. The farmers on farms closest to the low road had found animals dead, their throats cut.

After the Flood

By September 1, 2009

Four years after Hurricane Katrina, a New Orleanian before and after the storm has guest edited our September issue culling art of all genres with the hopes of identifying how New Orleans is healing.

Are We There Yet?

By September 1, 2009
From the ruins of East New Orleans, one of the neighborhoods hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina, eighteen-year-old Monique Thomas wonders when the world will hear their SOS.

Pedaling New Orleans

By September 1, 2009
After returning home to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, nineteen-year-old Daniel Hoppes reacquaints himself with his city by touring it on two wheels.

Hitler’s Horse

By September 1, 2009
A suburban high school student finds love (sort of) when his sleepy Louisiana town—and his plans to rob the grave of Adolf Hitler’s horse—gets rained on by Hurricane Katrina. A true story.

Albino

By September 1, 2009
The dog had first appeared to Boone one night as he sat in what remained of his living room, staring at the tarp that hung in place of what used to be his living room wall.

Snapshot

By September 1, 2009
There is the talk of friends, uncles / disappeared, impossible to translate / because in English one disappears, // is not disappeared.

Student Fiction From New Orleans

By September 1, 2009
The following fiction was written by students in the New Orleans area as part of our New Orleans Special Issue. ____________________________ The Dead Man by Adam Gnuse There wasn’t all too much left of the dead man besides the bones and what must have been his belt buckle. His skull was still intact, but one […]

Student Poetry from New Orleans

By September 1, 2009
_The following poetry was written by Lusher Charter School students of New Orleans. _ **His Only Begotten Rat** _by Taylor Yarbrough_ In the busy city, spectators pass and laugh lazily at three men hanging from a light post: a clean sport to see whose palms will burn first. I stand in the middle under the […]

Norman Solomon: The Afghanistan Gap: Press vs. Public

By August 27, 2009
This month, a lot of media stories have compared President Johnson's war in Vietnam and President Obama's war in Afghanistan. The comparisons are often valid, but a key parallel rarely gets mentioned -- the media's insistent support for the war even after most of the public has turned against it.

White Canvas House

By August 15, 2009

What’s revealing about Obama’s art selections for the White House has nothing to do with gender or race. It’s more abstract than that.

Last Temptation

By August 15, 2009
The former mouthpiece for insurance giant Cigna divulges his role in misleading the public, the emotional day that led to his whistle-blowing, and what should really scare you.

Robert Reich: Sarah Palin’s Death Panels

By August 14, 2009
In her short time on the public stage, we've come to expect this sort of thing from Governor Palin. But listen to other Republicans these days -- and if you can bear it, tune in to right-wing Hate Radio -- and you'll hear more of the same.

Norman Solomon: The Incredible Shrinking Healthcare Reform

By August 5, 2009
While the healthcare policy outcomes are looking grim, the supposed political imperatives are fueling the desires of Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill to produce a victory that President Obama can tout as healthcare reform. The likely result is a glide path to disaster.

The Genius Meetings

By August 3, 2009

We meet to congratulate ourselves but we also meet to purge ourselves. We meet to share things we cannot share with you. Smart things but also customs. Like the metaphorical value of sleeping in a nightcap to keep the genius in.

Food Among the Ruins

By August 1, 2009

Detroit, the country’s most depressed metropolis, has zero produce-carrying grocery chains. It also has open land, fertile soil, ample water, and the ingredients to reinvent itself from Motor City to urban farm.

Robert Reich: The Future of Universal Health Care, as of Now

By July 27, 2009
Every day that goes by without a vote in the House or Senate on universal health care makes it less likely that major reform will occur, meaning next fall we get something called "universal health insurance" that still leaves millions of Americans uninsured and doesn't substantially slow the meteoric rise of health-care costs.

Norman Solomon: Spinning Healthcare: A Bad Case of Vertigo

By July 23, 2009
The kind of arguments heard during the early '60s against guaranteed healthcare for the elderly can now be heard against establishing a comprehensive single-payer system. But now, the healthcare debate is trapped between a political establishment that doesn't want a single-payer system and news media that insist on ignoring its real potential.

Reese Erlich: Iran and Leftist Confusion

By July 23, 2009
When I returned from covering the Iranian elections recently, I was surprised to find my email box filled with progressive authors, academics and bloggers who had concluded that the current unrest there must be sponsored or manipulated by the U.S. That comes as quite a shock to those risking their lives daily on the streets of major Iranian cities fighting for political, social and economic justice.

Tom Engelhardt: On Escalation

By July 18, 2009
In an ongoing assessment of the devolving situation in Afghanistan the Obama Administration will undoubtedly resort to troop escalation. Too bad no one's escalating the diplomacy.

Friend Pick: Hasdai Westbrook

By July 18, 2009
I highly recommend that you go out and nab a copy of American Parent whether you’re a parent, want to be one or would run a mile in the opposite direction at the sight of a stork.

The Infinite in the Infinitesimal

By July 15, 2009

How is it that miniature works can express so much? For the author, an exhibition of tiny objects conjures thoughts of philosopher Gaston Bachelard, homes designed for low-emission living, dinner in a shed, and the infinite.

Robert Reich: Goldman’s Back, and Why We Should Be Worried

By July 14, 2009
Now that Goldman Sachs has posted record earnings as revenue from trading and stock underwriting reached all-time highs, less than a year after the firm took $10 billion from taxpayers, you can expect them to revert to their old ways in politics if their old ways in the market backfire again.

Nerdsmith

By July 7, 2009
Before he disappears from the spotlight once more, Junot Diaz sets the record straight on immigration, identity, family, and the brief and wondrous origins of his novel’s title character.

John Sevigny: Photography Must Die

By July 7, 2009
The 21st Century photographer can learn more studying the collected work of Claude Monet, Francisco Goya, Jackson Pollock, or Anselm Kiefer than by aping the photographic vocabulary force fed to us.

Whirlpool

By July 6, 2009
The house she grew up in, with its walled-in courtyard, windowless rooms, on gray streets in Ghanat Abad, with some of the houses and shops boarded up, some damaged during the Iran-Iraq war and never repaired, and women walking around in dark shroud-like chadors, had seemed like jail.

Scores killed in China protest (Audio & Video)

By July 6, 2009
A reported 140 people were killed and more than 800 were injured in a violent clash in China. One BBC reporter in Shanghai says this was “one of the most serious clashes between the authorities and demonstrators in China since Tiananmen Square in 1989.”

The Last Geronimo

By July 1, 2009

The monkey shrieks and runs across the table, scattering purchase orders. They have just finished the “Fancy Furry Friends” trade show in Las Vegas where the monkey dutifully twirled a tiny baton in a beguiling azure tulle and sequined gown.

Intelligence Without Design

By July 1, 2009

By bridging aspects of intelligent design with evolution in a new approach they call “possibilism,” the authors probably haven’t solved the American culture wars. But they might have.

Good Fences

By July 1, 2009

While building a tree house with his father, the author at twelve begins to understand the politics at play in the backyards of his suburban neighborhood.

In My Place

By July 1, 2009

Pakistan’s dynasty-bashing heir apparent, Fatima Bhutto, discusses how Obama and corruption legitimize the Taliban, her work to include women in Pakistani politics, and why she will never run for office (it’s not why you think).

Roya Hakakian on Neda

By June 26, 2009
Every revolution needs icons and symbols -- an image that embodies a sense of universality of blight and at the same time innocence.

Norman Solomon: Full-Spectrum Idiocy: GOP and Chavez on Iran

By June 25, 2009
When approaching Iran, the Republican Party line and the Hugo Chavez line are running in opposite directions -- but parallel. The leadership of GOP reaction and the leadership of Bolivarian revolution have bought into the convenient delusion that long-suffering Iranian people require assistance from the U.S. government to resist the regime in Tehran.

Ex-detainees allege US, Afghan abuse (video)

By June 24, 2009
According to the BBC, as the Obama administration takes action to shut down Guantanamo, a detention facility in Bagram (a US military base in Afghanistan) expands. Ex-detainees talk to the BBC about their time at Bagram.

Greg Grandin: Touring Empire’s Ruins, From Detroit to the Amazon

By June 23, 2009
To truly grasp how far America has fallen from the heights of its industrial grandeur -- and to understand how that grandeur led to stupendous acts of folly -- you should tour a set of ruins far from the Midwest rustbelt; they lie, in fact, deep (and nearly forgotten) in, of all places, the Brazilian Amazon rainforest.

Joel Whitney: All About Iran

By June 22, 2009
A recap of some of the more in-depth, recent cultural coverage of Iran, and some other reasons Americans might be so fascinated by this story--besides our self-evident altruism.

Zoya Phan: Thailand Forcing Karen Refugees Back to Burma

By June 21, 2009
Up to 6,000 Karen have fled a new military offensive by the Burmese Army and its allies, the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army. Most have fled to Thailand. Now that there is less fighting in some places, Thai authorities apparently want the refugees to return to Burma.

Norman Solomon: Obama and Anti-War Democrats

By June 18, 2009
This is a crucial time for anti-war activists and other progressive advocates to get more serious about congressional politics. It's not enough to lobby for or against specific bills -- and it's not enough to just get involved at election time. Officeholders must learn that there will be campaign consequences.

Robert Reich: The Great Debt Scare: Why Has It Returned?

By June 11, 2009
Why are the ostensibly liberal Center for American Progress and New York Times participating in the Debt Scare right now when the economy is still mired in the worst depression since the Great one, meaning the government has to create larger deficits if the economy is to get going again?

On the Beauty of Violence

By June 9, 2009
On the twentieth anniversary of Geek Love, Dunn discusses her new book, the cultural value of boxing, and why some sports are superior to the arts.

Dreaming in Hindi

By June 9, 2009

Fighting cancer, the author escapes to India to learn Hindi and throw her life “in the air for a passion.”

Going Too Far

By June 9, 2009
The longtime Africa correspondent discusses the Kenyan whistleblower who risked his life to end corruption, why she rejects Dambisa Moyo’s thesis about aid and democracy, and how she learned to love Paul Wolfowitz.

Norman Solomon: Words and War

By June 8, 2009
Millions of words and factual data pour out of the Pentagon every day. Human truth is another matter, and there's plenty more media invisibility and erasure ahead for Afghan people as the Pentagon ramps up its war effort in their country.

Carole Joffe: The Legacy of George Tiller

By June 6, 2009
While the response to George Tiller's death demands outrage, another response to this killing must be to demand that the mainstream medical community acknowledge the reality that there will always be some women who need abortions later on in pregnancy.

Michael Archer: Can’t Get Arrested

By June 5, 2009
In an interview for Guernica Magazine, published June 1, I asked Wuer Kaixi where he planned to be yesterday, the twentieth anniversary of the Tianamen Square massacre. Kaixi, who became known to world when cameras captured him scolding Chinese Premier Li Peng while wearing a hospital gown, was one of the most prominent student leaders of the uprising.

Sarverville Remains

By June 5, 2009
This ain’t a novel, Mister Podawalski. There ain’t no editor like there was for what Sam writ from his mountain. There is just the Lord checking his notes.

Hurt to Read

By June 1, 2009

Back in the Mississippi Delta for the first time in four years, a teacher comes face to face with what he left behind.

A Lousy Deal

By June 1, 2009
On the twentieth anniversary of Tiananmen Square, the student leader made famous for scolding the premier in his hospital gown discusses life in exile, guilt over the students’ deaths, and how his movement was a mere first step toward greater political freedom in China.

A Rare Sighting

By June 1, 2009
His excuses were always attributable to recent sightings of Bigfoot, the half-man, half-beast, which he argued demanded immediate documentation by a legitimate authority.

Robert Reich: A Modest Plan For Paying College Costs

By May 22, 2009
As he gets ready to head to a commencement at the University of California Berkeley Robert Reich offers a plan to pay back college tuition, linking repayment to a fixed percent of subsequent wages for a limited number of years, enabling all graduates to follow their dreams into whatever work they want.

Norman Solomon: The March of Folly, Continued

By May 21, 2009
"The March of Folly," a book published 25 years ago explains, as well as anything written since, President Obama's policy towards Afghanistan--one based, as was the case in Vietnam, more on military strength than on political diplomacy or humanitarian efforts.

Philip C. Winslow: Cluster Weapons: On the Way Out

By May 19, 2009
A movement to ban cluster weapons is gathering pace. It's possible that this time around the U.S., which has not used cluster munitions since 2003 in Iraq, will join, helping make the weapons and their explosive sub-munitions a military artifact.

Watch: Chevron’s Amazon Crude mess on 60 Minutes

By May 19, 2009
When Texaco left Ecuador in 1992, it left one huge environmental mess. The result has been a suit by tens of thousands of Ecuadorians against Chevron, which bought Texaco, for $27 billion. This is the biggest environmental lawsuit in history.

Robert Reich: The Health Care Cave-In

By May 18, 2009
"Don't make the perfect the enemy of the better" is a favorite slogan in Washington because compromise is necessary to get anything done. But the way things are going with health care, a better admonition would be: "Don't give away the store."

Link Roundup

By May 15, 2009
A poetry project goes on summer vacation, Obama changes his mind on military commissions, a Columbia Professor says there is no genocide in Darfur, and more.

The Genocide Myth

By May 12, 2009
In his latest book, Mamdani attacks the Save Darfur Coalition as ahistorical and dishonest, and argues that the conflict in Darfur is more about land, power, and the environment than it is directly about race.

Norman Solomon: A Progressive Challenge to Jane Harman

By May 12, 2009
Marcy Winograd's race to unseat Jane Harman in California's 36th District in 2010 reflects -- and is likely to help nurture -- a growing maturity among progressives around the country who are tired of merely complaining about centrist Democrats in Congress.

In Praise of Failure

By May 10, 2009

Citing French literary gods like Proust and Molière, the French prankster extraordinaire, in a new translation by Suzanne Menghraj, asks, “Isn’t it high time we started thinking about all the crap good writers make?”

Standing Before History

By May 10, 2009
On May 27, Shell goes to court over the 1995 execution of iconic Nigerian writer and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. His son, Ken Wiwa, Jr., and bestselling novelist Richard North Patterson discuss Saro-Wiwa’s legacy, Nigeria now, and the upcoming landmark trial.

Three Short-Short Stories

By May 8, 2009
Aside from the phone calls, it occurred to me that Dan hadn’t spoken to anyone in over a week. The cottage could be isolating in that way and I was too raw for him to go.

Anaphylaxis

By May 1, 2009
I washed down the thick, sweet smelling medicine with water, hoping her cramping intestines would absorb it into her bloodstream fast enough to keep her alive until Soweto.

Chain Reaction

By May 1, 2009

One year after the earthquake that devastated central China, the author contemplates the connections between the quake, Chinese history, and his father’s death.

Human Nature

By May 1, 2009

Is modern conservation linked with ethnic cleansing? In an excerpt from his new book, the investigative historian explores the concepts of wilderness and nature, and argues that the removal of aboriginal people from their homeland to create wilderness is a charade.

Geomancy

By May 1, 2009
All things that find a death there take / an invisible token of that freshwater pout: / a bone is dragged into pines and oak, / an organ ends up sailing around in the rain, / the rest is dissected there on the sands.

Guided by Voices

By April 19, 2009

Why every nation needs a poet—an essay on Israel, Palestine, and the United States, from Amman, Jordan.

Robert Reich: We Need More Stimulus, Not More Bailout

By April 14, 2009
Tim Geithner believes that the economy will be rescued when banks lend again, but most people are already carrying too much debt and don't want to borrow more money. As he prepares to return to Congress for what will be, if he even gets it, the last money Congress will give the administration, he needs to focus on stimulus rather than bailout.

We Need to Win

By April 13, 2009
The environmental child prodigy on how the economy can benefit from green initiatives, why Canada and the U.S. must help lead the way, and the role for tribal peoples in conservation.

Norman Solomon: Getting a Death Grip on Memory

By April 9, 2009
A recent New York Times article told of research being done on the possibility of erasing certain memories. While the research scientists are just scratching the surface in this field, American media outlets have been at it for a long time.

Our Reality Has Not Been Magical

By April 9, 2009
With a newly-elected leftist government in El Salvador, exiled Salvadoran novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya is optimistic about the future of a country that once responded to his novels with death threats.

Tom Engelhardt: Terminator Planet: Launching the Drone Wars

By April 8, 2009
As you sit in that movie theater in May watching the latest installment in the Terminator series, actual unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), pilotless surveillance and assassination drones armed with Hellfire missiles, will be patrolling our expanding global battlefields, hunting down human beings.

Strangers in a Strange Land

By April 7, 2009

Catching fleeting moments that might normally pass by unremarked in the great whirl of everyday life is the writer’s mission, and one that is especially enlivened by the tabula rasa of a foreign country.

Ruski Business

By April 7, 2009

During the Cold War, the son of an American journalist, soon to be jailed, spends his Moscow nights drinking, smoking, and black-marketing with Russian metalheads.

Choruss: A Correction

By April 7, 2009
We the editors regret any implication, in our blog that ran last Wednesday, that Choruss hoped to break or circumvent the law.

Robert Reich: Why You Should Work for a Hedge Fund

By April 7, 2009
The hedge fund managers who raked in billions last year wouldn't have done nearly as well had taxpayers not bailed out Wall Street to begin with. Now, these are exactly the sort of investors Tim Geithner is trying to lure in to buy troubled assets from banks, with an extraordinary offer financed by you and me and other taxpayers.

Shadowing the Dogs of War

By April 6, 2009

As conflict once again threatens the heart of Palestine and Israel, our writer takes a look back to one group who, after great struggle, found a way to ford rivers of blood and tear down the walls of their own minds.

Norman Solomon: Democrats and War Escalation

By April 6, 2009
Obama's insistence on increasing the number of troops in Afghanistan will fracture his base inside the Democratic Party. If he insists on leading a party of war, there will be those within the party who organize to transform it into the party for peace.

Día

By April 6, 2009

I find him sitting on a plastic lounge chair by the hotel pool. I give a little wave and he stands. We kiss on the cheek. He tells me I’m taller than he remembers.

Canada

By April 6, 2009
When he rows out to collect the geese, / he thinks, like any god, this is just / what you do.

Robert Reich: It’s a Depression

By April 3, 2009
This is still not the Great Depression of the 1930s, but it is a Depression. And the only way out is government spending on a very large scale. We should stop worrying about Wall Street. Worry about American workers. Use money to build up Main Street, and the future capacities of our workfo

Aiding Is Abetting

By April 2, 2009
International author and economist on ending western aid to Africa, what Bono and Geldof don't get, and the stifling of African independence and entrepreneurship.

John Sevigny: Pierre Toutain-Dorbec’s ‘Confronting the Past – The Aftermath of the Khmer Rouge Regime’

By April 2, 2009
“Straight” portraiture is one of humanity’s oldest art forms, with the first known example made 27,000 years ago on a cave wall in France. But in spite of its long history, portraiture is one of the most difficult art forms to “get right.” The photographs of Pierre Toutain-Dorbec, like the paintings centuries before by Diego de Velazquez, do just that.

La Poste Américaine

By April 1, 2009

An American in Germany sifts through the cultural signposts, in pursuit of what it means to belong to a particular nation.

Two Poems

By April 1, 2009
With these five bones, human bones, / Doctor Chanca makes me a cannibal / by arranging feathers from the hand / of another cannibal

Garry Leech: Troubling New Military Strategy in Afghanistan

By March 19, 2009
With the NATO-led coalition in Afghanistan struggling on the battlefield against a resilient insurgency and opium poppy cultivation on the rise it has been suggested that the United States should import the counterinsurgency and counternarcotics model currently being employed in Colombia to Afghanistan. This stance fails to recognize gross violations of human rights, a massive refugee crisis and record levels of opium poppy cultivation, which have occurred as a result of Plan Colombia.

Farmers and Chickens

By March 11, 2009
The ICC’s lead prosecutor on the Court’s first arrest warrant for a sitting head of state, why his Court is nobody’s instrument but the law’s, and how he got his mother to see the light.

A Meeting

By March 6, 2009
Jiyoung did seem traumatized from the experience. She said she was scared to be by herself at night, so Jan let her stay in her apartment, and of course Jan stayed with her. I wasn’t so happy about my bed being empty, but I wanted to do the bigger thing, so I didn’t complain, not a peep.

Decorum: A Study

By March 3, 2009
A person could be at a loss. The width, spools and yardage, meringue / airs, impossible long fingers, of decorum. Its army sashay of the side- / walk.

Dumb Show

By March 2, 2009
The spine does its turtle charade / and the fingers can be counted on / to dance the spider dance or perform

Who’ll Stop the Rain

By March 1, 2009

What if the September 11th attacks had coincided with the ravage of Hurricane Katrina? In India during November’s monsoon and the Mumbai attacks, our writer weighs the connections between weather and terrorism.

Loyalty

By March 1, 2009
We were not inventive people and so we called my friend Crazy Fucker. He took to the name like he took to us, with a fierce loyalty.

Tick-Tock

By February 9, 2009

The daughter of a Jewish-American peace negotiator narrates the drama of her father's surprisingly--and perhaps inappropriately--close relationship with Yasir Arafat.

Norman Solomon: Why Are We Still at War?

By February 3, 2009
We have seen and heard it proved again and again that, as retired Army general William Odom put it in 2002, "Terrorism is not an enemy...It’s about as sensible to say we declare war on night attacks and expect we’re going to win that war." And still, as we speak, the deployment orders for more troops to Afghanistan are going through the channels.

Two Poems

By February 2, 2009
Beautiful, finally, inside the quiet / Latrine of my Mexican / Confessional: // Rode a pony, drove / A tractor, and never / Finished the first grade.

Forgiveness

By February 1, 2009
Her advisor leaned toward her, his face close to hers, and looked her square in the eyes. “Nan,” he said. “No one can ever really plan for things like this.”

John Sevigny: Slavery in the Sunshine State

By January 29, 2009
Since 1997 -- though the very word evokes faded images of Frederick Douglas, the Underground Railroad, and overloaded ships arriving from Africa -- slavery has been making headlines and drawing sharp rebukes from farm worker advocate groups and others in Florida.

Tom Engelhardt: Waltz with Bashir

By January 25, 2009
As a 19-year-old Israeli soldier, Ari Folman took part in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and was on duty in Beirut during the notorious massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Tom Engelhardt brings us an excerpt from his new graphic novel, Waltz with Bashir.

Robert Reich: How America Embraced Lemon Socialism

By January 25, 2009
If anyone has a good argument for why the shareholders of the losing sectors of the economy should not be cleaned out first, and their creditors and executives and directors second -- before taxpayers get stuck with the astonishingly-large bill -- let's hear it.

John Sevigny: Texas thugs

By January 20, 2009
In one last act of disregard for the law, George W. Bush commuted the prison sentences of two Border Patrol agents, and in so doing disrespected the federal jurors who convicted them.

Norman Solomon: The Return of Triangulation

By January 18, 2009
While it’s too early to gauge specific policies of the Obama presidency, certain aspects are reminiscent of Bill Clinton's presidency. Progressives need to do more than vent their disappointment. They need to be involved.

John Sevigny: Port of Patras Refugee Camp

By January 16, 2009
With his exhibition, Greek photographer George Poutachidis shows us refugees from Iraq and Afghanistan, driven out of their native countries awaiting a chance to get to Europe, a continent run by governments who do not want them.

The Limits to My Self-Importance

By January 10, 2009
The neo-conservative who coined “axis of evil” on how writing for the president is like writing for the movies, the administration’s “departures from the law,” and why the president should have brought in Democrats.

Four Short-Short Stories

By January 5, 2009
He was mostly into curve balls. He handled the ball in odd ways, not holding the way you were supposed to, with your fingers in the right holes, lining up, getting centered. He bowled as if it were a dance, a slow one with a beat you made up from the inside.

Phantom Pain

By January 1, 2009

The daughter of a Nazi soldier recalls the spark and fizzle of her tenth New Year's Eve.

Two Poems

By January 1, 2009
It’s as if for a man battered by the wind, / blinded by snow—all around him an arctic / inferno pummels the city— / a door opens along a wall.

Jesse’s Story

By January 1, 2009

I watch the color as she moves, carrying all of him in her form as if she knows. Stopping before a photograph, she meets my brother for the first time. Propped, he is supported by a slim frame of wood, reduced to a single moment in a four inch by six inch frame, laughing.

Norman Solomon: A Hundred Eyes for an Eye

By December 29, 2008
Even if you set aside the magnitude of Israel’s violations of the Geneva conventions and the long terrible history of its methodical collective punishment of 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza, consider the vastly disproportionate carnage in the conflict.

Flocks of Never

By December 8, 2008
In these moments, I’d imagine, / though I never saw anything / like it, the spray of twelve gauge / buckshot entering the body / of a goose in mid-air, / and its mate, its mate for life, / would honk, drop down, / honk, follow the limp body / to the ground.

Fire Inside

By December 3, 2008

In the Sri Lankan city of Batticaloa, an American peace worker watches one woman bravely face the worst the world can offer.

Preservation

By December 3, 2008

The inhabitants of the Marshall Islands have endured waves of immigration, exploitation, and America’s nuclear testing. Now under threat from rising sea levels, their storytelling culture offers us a cautionary tale.

The Trapdoor

By December 2, 2008
Five rounds passed, without pain or glory. Nothing happened in the ring to excite the sparse crowd.

No. 2 Dumpling Assembly Line

By December 1, 2008
The first to go was the coal delivery man and his daughter. His name was Zhou, sounding like the Duke of Zhou, a prominent early follower of Confucius. The choice of the coal delivery man was a popular one. The coal delivery man was known for shorting the residents on coal.

Marya Hornbacher: Seeing War Through Borrowed Eyes

By November 18, 2008
When Megan Rye's brother returned from his tour in Iraq with over two thousand photographs marked by his uncanny skill and observation, she began painting them. The result is a nearly photorealistic series of images so quietly powerful the viewer tends to tumble into them headfirst.

John Sevigny: Just Passing Through

By November 16, 2008
While in the U.S. the immigration issue has been buried under more "urgent" news, in Mexico U.S-bound Central American immigrants are facing a more dangerous trek than ever.

Tom Engelhardt: Don’t Let Barack Obama Break Your Heart

By November 13, 2008
If Obama accepts a War on Terror framework, as he already seems to have, he may soon find himself locked into all sorts of unpalatable situations, as once happened to another Democratic president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who opted to escalate an inherited war when what he most wanted to do was focus on domestic policy.

Food

By November 11, 2008
I’m a better person than a particular author of a particular story says I am and I won’t keep quiet about it any longer. One reason I can’t hold my peace is that the author is my husband.

Clever Kidz

By November 11, 2008
She grabbed my hair at the nape, plunged me in, jammed mud past my teeth. She’s a Blackwater mercenary, so no messing around. She wasn’t here for Christmas but at last I found her on the bank of the river, I was back with my sister at last!

Ode to Nitrous Oxide

By November 4, 2008

Isn’t it funny how good numb can feel? Is that / the experience? Or is it waking up after—lucid but no longer asking (or caring) /where it throbs—or when—or why—or because of whom.

The Body or its Not

By November 1, 2008
I have plans to kill a creature. The best / I can explain it is: I’m afraid. Of what / will be left—a hoof, the jaw, one sun-dried- / soft-as-oats ear.

Baghdad Nights

By November 1, 2008
What can a California geographer possibly teach us about the American troop surge and ethnic cleansing in Iraq?

How Soft is Smart

By October 8, 2008
The author and statesman on the definition of soft power, why it's imperative to getting what a country wants, and which presidential candidate is better equipped to use it.

Anti-Drudge

By October 8, 2008

Until his conscience overcame him, David Brock was conservatives' go-to hitman. The inside story of the media watchdog who has Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage--even Stephen Colbert--fuming mad.

The Seven Credos: Guernica Fiction Guest-Edited by Ben Marcus

By October 8, 2008

I want to offer one-sentence credos written by each of the contributors, and it will show you in shorthand what drives them, what they believe is possible in writing, and how they distill their practice (especially when they know that their sentences will be published without attribution, which is how I got them to cough up these mottos in the first place).

January in December

By October 8, 2008

Church was bunk. Scarves were bunk. The cold was bunk. Robert Fancer’s grandfather, the man he was wheeling back from afternoon service in a crappy chair, was massively bunk.

The Peephole

By October 8, 2008

We are all of us spectators—and this must be asserted in the face of the many naive traditions insisting that a portion of us are of a lesser sort, and can or should not truly bear witness to Agony and all that precedes it.

Regards from Mozambique

By October 7, 2008
Gordon was the only person she knew, other than her parents, who paid to have a paper delivered to his door each morning. He followed gubernatorial campaigns in states he did not live in and had never lived in.

I Think of Pilgrims

By October 6, 2008

Cellphoned to their continents, Pilgrims / from whatever persecution, kill those turkeys in / want, want, want, and the landing gear drops.

Vacation

By October 6, 2008

in superficial ways—the size of the chimney or placement of the porch—or in meeker assertions, a mailbox that looked like a reindeer, a soggy doll fastened to a swing. Evidence of thoughtless, pleasureless lives.

She Is, Because

By October 6, 2008

She was walking with the short man. Though only yesterday she had been with the tall man. Or she was walking behind the short man, down the street, wondering did she really want to do this and if not why would she be doing it?

Waiting

By October 1, 2008

My friends in the camp are known by the inscriptions written on their t-shirts. Acapulco wears a t-shirt with the inscription, Acapulco. Sexy’s t-shirt has the inscription Tell Me I’m Sexy. Paris’s t-shirt says See Paris And Die.

Plague

By October 1, 2008
Fold back your sleeve, cara, so I can see / the lining and the wrist bone’s alp. A girl / in Castello grew white fur on her tongue // when I was fifteen. All but the pink tip, / like a tiny monk’s head, a tonsured pate. / Then the fur blackened, and the monk grew horribly young.

Postcards from the Museum of Olivia

By October 1, 2008

In Leroy’s account, a woman named Amanda, who wears a name tag that identifies her as a sales associate at the Museum of Olivia, explains that entering the town requires the payment of an admission fee because, “the Town of Olivia is the Museum of Olivia.”

The Woman on the Tape

By October 1, 2008
Things float around like the room is a tide pool. I’m never sure what’s going to be where and what’s going to appear.

Robert Reich: The Stalled Deal

By September 30, 2008
As partisan finger-pointing takes place over the Bailout of All Bailouts being voted down, Robert Reich offers his prediction for what bill will be enacted.

Luc Sante: Summer in the City

By September 28, 2008
A story of death and infrastructure: When a car topples a building cops and neighbors alike do what they can to avoid thinking about what could be next.

No Exit

By September 16, 2008
The election watchdog dissects why Las Vegas slot machines have more oversight than U.S. voting machines, and claims that Hillary Clinton's New Hampshire primary victory was rigged.

Two Poems

By September 15, 2008

To enter the state of being a tree it’s necessary / to begin with a gecko’s amphibian torpor /

at three in the afternoon in the month of August.

Growing Controversy

By September 14, 2008

Once the target of the U.S. war on drugs, Bolivian coca is being repackaged by activist farmers in hopes of giving the crop a legal life in this destitute nation.

Bev Harris : Pick Quick, the Line’s Growing

By September 13, 2008
A new "time out" feature that kicks voters off of voting machines after 150 seconds of inactivity, record voter participation, and estimates of voter list density based on 2004 information rather than 2008, all add up to difficulty at the polls.

The Memoirs and Prison Journal of Horace W. Redpole, 1793-1794

By September 1, 2008

Grandmother was sprawled upon the couch in a heap of black crinoline; her shockingly white legs were raised in the air. Mr. Sparrow supported himself in a very precarious position and did not look the least bit comfortable but was busy grinding his privates into Grandmother’s, much like a mortar and pestle.

Only Different

By September 1, 2008
Bruce claims it would be madness to suppose / these two poles of American Romance / —does What Maisie Knew fit at the North Pole? / The Land of Oz
at the South?—could even / hypothesize each other’s existence…

Cracked, Not Shattered

By August 23, 2008

The congresswoman and author on the impact of Hillary's candidacy and the utter shortsightedness of voting for McCain; plus, the next big goal for women, and the importance of supportive fathers.

Shock and Awe

By August 16, 2008

Seth Fischer was like most of his friends, protesting a faraway war being fought by people, on both sides, he didn't know. Lance Corporal Eric Vargas changed all that.

The New York Sun’s Obama Frame-Up

By August 14, 2008
Two months ago, I wrote about The New York Sun's inaccurate attempt to draw ties between Senator Barack Obama and Islamic extremism in Kenya. The chief problem with The Sun's reporting was that while the ties may have been there, the Islamic extremism was definitely not.

The Fed and Authoritarian Capitalism

By August 12, 2008
The Fed acting without congressional authority isn’t Chinese-type authoritarian capitalism, of course, but nor is it, strictly speaking, what we’ve come to expect from a democracy.

Shroud

By August 8, 2008
Luc Sante offers a story of a man's attempt to meander through the Midwest, leading to an unexpected place and time.

Never Again, Again

By August 4, 2008
The Olympics are nearly upon us, and China continues to ignore the people of Darfur. Perhaps they can offer assistance if and when the genocide ends.

Roll Deep

By August 3, 2008
Kill All Your Darlings and Low Life author Luc Sante on the majesty of rhythm, the primacy of surprise, and his cluelessness toward plot.

What, Friends, Is A Life?

By August 1, 2008
Honestly I don’t understand many / People. But, Friends, if you plan on dying // By your own hand, don’t use pills. Swallowing / Is simply another way of marking time.

The Perils of Parables

By July 17, 2008
With the Obama campaign trying to make inroads in the evangelical community it is easy to see the perils of mixing politics and religion and why we should be moving away from identity politics as the guiding principle of our campaigns.

Plastic Jade

By July 14, 2008
Melissa didn’t think anything about Boone at all, but she smiled at him. She ducked her eyes, looking away the way men like a girl to do. In the years she’d been in this brothel, she’d learned a lot about what men want.

Crisis Darfur

By July 9, 2008
(Part 2) Actor/activist Mia Farrow on the continued slaughter, China's role, and what we can do to help the people of Darfur

McCain’s Budget Whopper

By July 7, 2008
How exactly does John McCain propose to balance the budget by the end of his first term? By telling Americans that supply-side economics works even though they know it doesn't.

World’s End: North of San Francisco

By July 1, 2008

Here at the continent’s end, fortifications / linger for the end of the world. They greet // each California morning, these barracks in the fog. / Below, the lagoon is gunmetal, or mercury poured.

Health Care and Ghosts of War

By June 19, 2008
The insurance and hospital industries at the center of health care in the United States are profiting from priorities that condemn many people to death, while corporate enterprises continue to make a killing from U.S. military expenditures.

Two Poems

By June 15, 2008
Space is full of mental rooms where we can go / Like a hunter unleashing his dogs, I freed my spirit into them

Burial

By June 14, 2008

She was limp and sweaty but I snuggled into the comfortable softness of her. They had cut her open, and she was whole. She looked very tired and sick; on her gown, blood bloomed like a slow flower.

Gwangju (from a novel-in-progress)

By June 14, 2008
Smoke lingered in the air but I knew it wasn’t the smoke I was reacting to. Hundreds of feet thundered by, some in sneakers and socks, others in heavy, lace-up boots. We were in a storm of bodies, arms, and legs pumping here and there, shouts and chants interspersed with cries of rage and screams of pain. I

NOGM (from a novel-in-progress)

By June 14, 2008
He responded to my Craigslist posting fairly quickly. Age, location, and phone number—he was strictly business. I was hesitant about meeting him, but he kept saying, Nothing has to happen. It doesn't have to if you don't want it to. We'll go somewhere well-lit. C’mon.

Deadly ‘Diplomacy’

By June 12, 2008
As George W. Bush lays more flagstones along the path to war on Iran, mainline U.S. news media is, as it was leading up to the war on Iraq, incomplete.

Healthscare

By June 11, 2008
The former Pfizer veep-turned-whistleblower on how the pharmaceutical industry is like the mob, the sad state of U.S. healthcare, and his fruitless attempts at finding work.

Designed to Survive

By June 11, 2008

The Supreme Court ruled last week that prisoners in Guantánamo Bay have a right to challenge their imprisonment in a civilian court. Having been kidnapped, tortured, raped, and driven to try suicide, prisoner Jumah al-Dossary was one of the lucky ones.

Turf

By June 9, 2008
Guestblogger Luc Sante on the time when graffiti truly became an artform in New York.

Tube of Thunder

By June 8, 2008
Mike is irresistible—a skinny guy with worried eyebrows. He likes to hustle poker, does not own a TV, and carries a handkerchief around for his allergies. His apartment is directly under Hellgate Bridge; he gets it cheap because a train shakes the building six times a day.

Health Part 4: Black Tide

By June 3, 2008
According to the United Nations, the oil spill caused by Israel’s attack on Lebanon two years ago is the size of the Exxon Valdez spill from 1989. Photos of the aftermath.

Two Poems

By June 1, 2008
I am a poisoned well, / I told the ram / as he flared his nostrils. / Everything in me is poisoned.

The Stagnation

By May 15, 2008
The stagnation is deafening. / Then some menacing / Nudists walk past / Laughing, which doesn’t / Affect the stagnation.

I Want My AJE

By May 15, 2008

Al Jazeera English broadcasts in nearly 120 million homes worldwide, but only a handful are in the United States. Here is why.

Patriot Missile

By May 12, 2008

The punk rock icon discusses debating the soldiers in Iraq, Sean Hannity's lack of courage, and the incalculable influence of Chuck D

Two Poems

By May 1, 2008

It’s true I slept with Abe Lincoln. / I now know everything there is to know about this country. / Believe me, I carry a tapeworm for you the size of Kentucky.

How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

By May 1, 2008
You didn't have a real grandpa, Aleksandar, only a sad man. He mourned for his river and his earth. He would kneel down, scratch about in that earth of his until his fingernails broke and the blood came.

The Machine Edda

By April 26, 2008
First they see the pale tendrils of steam rising up and then the gleaming cantilevered roof and then they are pulling up their wagons before the refinery, which is like a haphazardly assembled aluminum pagoda set into the high wall that marks the boundary of the kingdom Mnemosyne.

The Loves of Mao

By April 18, 2008
Mao loves to swim. Beside Li-Min’s bed, above her nightstand, there is evidence. A yellowing newspaper clipping displays Mao Tse-tung’s perfectly round head and shining eyes, bobbing brilliantly out of the Yangtze’s dark waves.

Wading Through the Mainstream

By April 15, 2008
Mainstream media likes its buzz words and catch phrases. Luckily there are those out there pointing out the absurdity of only relying on these limited words and phrases.

Eviction Slip

By April 14, 2008

While many governments now involve indigenous groups in environmental conservation, India is on the verge of creating what might become the largest mass eviction for conservation ever. Groups like India's Adivasis have come to be called “conservation refugees.” Mark Dowie tells their story.

Sectarian Conflict: Who’s to Blame?

By April 2, 2008

A survey by Baghdad's best pollster asked Iraqis which "suits you well": Sunni Muslim, Shia Muslim, or Just Muslim. The biggest category chose the last option. Then came the US occupation.

Death Metal and the Indian Identity

By April 1, 2008

When writer Akshay Ahuja transported a guitar to India, little did he know he was being led down a rabbit hole to a vibrant subculture by a group that styled itself the Cremated Souls

Three Poems

By April 1, 2008
When you have left me / the sky drains of color // like the skin of a tightening fist.

Rumors and Retribution

By March 27, 2008

In this extract from his memoir, Escape from Saddam, Lewis Alsamari recalls some of the gruesome rumors and boyhood experiences that led to his dangerous escape from one of the world's most feared regimes.

Moral Hazard Redux

By March 21, 2008
There's a double standard in America when it comes to economic risk-taking: When the risk fails the little guys get tough love, while the big guys get forgiveness.

The Psychological Trauma of War

By March 14, 2008
National Public Radio correspondent Margot Adler examines soldiers returning to the U.S. from Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD and how the rest of us can connect with them when they do.

The Farce of Iraqi Sovereignty

By March 10, 2008

Five years after the invasion of Iraq, Jonathan Steele shows the surge's inherent contradictions. To increase security is to diminish sovereignty, which fuels resistance. There is one solution: Admit defeat, then leave.

Will HRC Spoil the Party?

By March 5, 2008
Will Hillary Clinton's fight for the Democratic presidential nomination reduce the possibility of the eventual nominee entering the White House in January of 2009?

The War Election

By March 4, 2008
By condemning the Iraq war as merely unwinnable instead of inherently wrong, the more restrained foes of the war helped to prolong the occupation that has inflicted so much carnage.

Two Poems

By March 1, 2008
Night renders everything insensible, / her eyes are filled with feathers, filled / with burning bridges, burning cornfields / wuthering to wind-blown ghosts of smoke.

The Most Wanted List: International Terrorism

By February 27, 2008
In light of the recent assassination of Imad Moughniyeh, a senior commander of Hizbollah, Noam Chomsky examines the definition of "the world" as used by the political class in Washington versus the rest of the world.

2008 and 1968

By February 25, 2008
Looking back at the events of 1968 that splintered the Democratic Party and marked the beginning of the ascension of a new Republican majority, Robert Reich argues that, with the pendulum now swinging back to the left, the democrats will need someone who, like John F. and Robert Kennedy, is a realist who understands the importance of idealism in the service of realism.

Two Short-Short Stories

By February 24, 2008
Before coming to the Amazon, she had heard stories about Jacques Gallant, whispers from female scientists at zoology conferences, always about a colleague-of-a-colleague who had been seduced by Jacques underneath a jungle canopy or in a mountain cave.

You Don’t Say

By February 24, 2008
I reached across the table and scooped pasta out of his bowl, ate it with my hands. He sighed. “You have tomato on your chin.”

Visiting the Torture Museum: Barbarism Then and Now

By February 22, 2008
A war meant to be on terror has adopted the worst traditions of terror from pre-Enlightenment days, and its staunchest supporters have redefined the word "torture" in such a way that its perpetrators can, by their definition, honestly say America does not torture.

The Relevance of Nooses and Lynching in the Age of Obama

By February 20, 2008
As Barack Obama's presidential campaign blurs the line of race in politics and places in the American psyche the very real possibility of the U.S. electing its first black president, it may be tempting to think that issues of race are behind us. Here, Sherrilyn A. Ifill reminds us that the economic, educational and political divide between whites and blacks is still alive and well, and cannot be overlooked even among the most positive of developments.

The Lost Kristol Tapes: What the New York Times Bought

By February 15, 2008
Just how close to an administration can someone be and not know what is going on, or rather, claim to not know what is going on and not be held accountable for it? Jonathan Schwarz examines the "horrifying ignorance and bold-faced deceit" of William Kristol to answer the question.

Two Poems

By February 15, 2008
No matter the time or place, I’ll always grow for the one who is the sea. / With one thin finger cut in half. / That is why I’m the oldest recipient of your on-again, off-again love.

David Brooks is Wrong: America Can Afford What Needs to be Done

By February 14, 2008
On the heels of George W. Bush's fiscal-political strategy of irresponsible supply-side tax cuts and military buildups, some question the ability of a Democratic president to follow through on campaign promises without breaking the bank. Here, Robert Reich offers three places a Democratic president could find the money.

Man with a Country

By February 5, 2008
Iran's USA scholar says it's not just American politics that demonize Iran, it's the culture, including books and films

Two Poems

By February 1, 2008
How it rises out of waves in the bay / and shudders like a gentle thrust / of the sea, which sooner forgives / than punishes, doomed as it is to feckless birth.

from The Mad Song

By January 11, 2008
Of Bedlam in its prairie pride. Of the roach that winds between the stars, triumphal. Of well-water served in garnet goblets. Of crusted penknife sitting on the pillow in the crib.

The Noticers

By January 11, 2008
When the heat comes I have to get out. I live on the top floor of a tenement walk-up, a flat filled to clutter with the detritus of a lifetime in New York City, my belongings packed so tight they seem to sweat and absorb all that’s breathable from the still air and deprive me of oxygen when I try to sleep. Such is the heat wave untempered by air conditioning. I haven’t slept in nights.

Join the Club

By January 11, 2008
Thus began my fascination with Holden Caulfield. Not the Holden Caulfield, archetypal anti-hero of American arts and letters, not to mention inspiration for some of our better-read assassins. I’m talking about Holden Caulfield Sapperstein, an all-too-real young lady whose parents named her, for better or worse, after their favorite author’s infamous creation.

The Papermaker

By January 11, 2008

The young man was having a cigarette on the street corner, feeling just about ready to get on with his day, when a man with a Clark Gable moustache and a shaved head leaned out his second story window and called down, “Hey you."

Perfecting the Death Penalty

By January 11, 2008
In 2007 more than 60 percent of the executions carried out in the U.S. occurred in Texas, and officials there have claimed that no innocent person has ever been put to death in the Lone Star State. As the rest of the country changes its views on this issue, what keeps Texas so steadfast in its own?

Journey to the Dark Side: The Bush Legacy (Take One)

By January 2, 2008
When it came to news of Bush administration torture, kidnapping, and offshore imprisonment practices, 2007 ended in a deluge, not a trickle. Here, Tom Engelhardt offers a recap of the startling number of stories (many hardly noticed) on those subjects that appeared in December alone, as well as an initial attempt to get to the heart of the Bush legacy, one year early.

Untitled

By January 1, 2008
I am given ten cubic meters of darkness / every night I pace over them obediently

2007 News for Guernica Poets

By December 31, 2007
An incomplete but still impressive list of 2007 publications and awards received by Guernica poetry advisers, contributors, guest editors, and interviewees.

The Mad Corporate World of Glenn Beck

By December 20, 2007
Norman Solomon goes on Glenn Beck's TV show and talks corporate ownership of and advertising in media. He brings the discussion close to Mr. Beck's home, much to the chagrin of the host.

Inequality is the Drug

By December 15, 2007
It would surprise most people to know that slave labor is just as prevalent in America as anywhere else in the world. Here John Bowe, the author of Nobodies, sheds light on America’s dirty secret and why it still exists.

Paying For It

By December 15, 2007
Trickle-down economics don't work, and still, Democratic presidential candidates are wedded to them. Robert Reich offers what he says should be the Democratic version of tough love.

The USA’s Human Rights Daze

By December 14, 2007
As Human Rights Day (December 10) came and went with little coverage in the U.S. media, Norman Solomon points out that while "human rights" issues, when covered, are done so as faraway injustice and cruelty, the U.S. fails on many of those issues domestically.

The Perfect Storm of Campaign 2008: War, Depression, and Turning-Point Elections

By December 10, 2007
In February of this year, writing about the history of turning-point elections at Tomdispatch.com, Steve Fraser, author of an acclaimed history of Wall Street, Every Man a Speculator, asked a question, but didn't answer it: In the wake of the 2006 Democratic take-over of House and Senate, would campaign 2008 turn out to be a rare presidential election of historic proportions? Now, he offers that answer loud and clear.

Three Poems

By December 2, 2007
In the name of his own history, / in a country mired in mud, / when hunger overtakes him / he eats his own forehead.

The Proliferation Game: How the World Helped Pakistan Build Its Bomb

By November 28, 2007
Having followed the trail of A. Q. Khan, the "father" of the "Pakistani" bomb, for the last four years, Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins use rare early letters Khan wrote to a friend and associate to make a simple but extremely powerful and original point, which they put this way: "Pakistan's nuclear arsenal -- as many as 120 weapons -- is no more Pakistani than your television set is Japanese. Or is that American? It was a concept developed in one country and, for the most part, built in another. Its creation was an example of globalization before the term was even coined." From TomDispatch.

The Media and Labor

By November 22, 2007
Norman Solomon offers two essays on the media's coverage of the workforce, and just how often that coverage misses the mark.

Two Films (a novel excerpt)

By November 15, 2007
As the projector unexplainably kept on rolling even after the house lights went up and the medics made their way to the front, some, apparently to the filmmaker’s credit as an artist and perhaps his detriment as a person, continued to watch and even laugh at the hazy antics on the screen.

Ball Game (a novel excerpt)

By November 15, 2007
He should have been thankful that Xavi died when their friendship was still intact, still unconditionally generous, as strong as their youthful athletes' muscles, as stubbornly perfect.

You’re My Only Home (a novel excerpt)

By November 15, 2007
The mirror needs to be hung up at a height of 18 feet. The four-foot stepladder we borrowed from the Weisses comes up nine feet short, and climbing the low-hanging branches has not been as easy as I first imagined. The bark leaves a slippery residue on my palms and the needles tear away as easily as leper hair.

456 Victoria (a novel excerpt)

By November 15, 2007
“I can’t study here." Karenne’s hand waved loosely over the room. Augati saw the whole shabby truth of her life. The coffee table: a door, the handle still on poking up through the magazines that concealed the rest, rows upon rows of old magazines, many with missing covers, many marked and marred by grease, spilled coffee, forgotten bubble gum. Even the pillow she had picked up when she joined Karenne was bald, and it stank.

Ghostwriting Gabo

By November 15, 2007

Guatemalan-born writer and translator David Unger recounts the chance encounter that led to the job of a lifetime: ghostwriter for Gabriel García Márquez

TomDispatch: Who’s the Enemy? In Iraq, It’s Getting Harder to Find Any Bad Guys

By November 12, 2007
The last three months have brought a dramatic decline in violence in Iraq with both U.S. and Iraqi death totals falling drastically. Under this improved situation, argues Robert Dreyfuss, an opportunity finally exists for a deal to be struck between the Sunni and Shia communities. However, having lost all its credibility over the past years, the U.S. is not in a position to broker the deal.

Two Poems

By November 4, 2007
Mobley talked about revolution. / Asterisk, palladium, forever unjaded. // He talked about two lives—the one we learn with / and the one we live after that.

Three Poems

By November 3, 2007
The woman at the DMV wasn't happy / when I asked if I could keep / my old driver’s license and use it / to fight terrorism. She doesn't understand / I'm trying to do my part.

Two Poems

By November 3, 2007
It is the bog hour, the minute / which dwindles into a speck of ash. / As I do every morning I fall into my chair, / like a pebble thrown into a well. I think / you are not too thin, though I am lying.

Cinderella

By November 3, 2007
Briefcase brother, what silver / Steamboat, brother, have you / Got for me this time.

Three Poems

By November 3, 2007

Yes, I have a pretty good idea what beauty is. It survives /

alright. It aches like an open book. It makes it difficult to live.

Irrational Waiting

By November 3, 2007

What does it take to drive the population of a county crazy? Apparently, just 3 liters of gas a day. Salar Abdoh navigates his way through the meaning behind Iran's fuel rationing.

Three Poems

By November 2, 2007
The animal must be shot. You must / be hungry enough to skin it without / flinching, must be willing to cook it, / still trembling over the watchful eye / of the fire.

Two Poems

By November 2, 2007
Shouldn’t you both be used to it— // a ritual which you revert to each night? / This turning off the light, / lying still, falling asleep.

Are You Abnormal?

By November 1, 2007

Join the club… or the Church of the Subgenius that is. A fringe religion that might not be as far out as it seems.

The generals’ shareholders

By October 28, 2007
A new film on Burma demolishes the triangulations, rationalizations and hypocrisies of governments, corporate crooks and liars around the globe. It's also a fine love story.

The Pro-War Undertow of the Blackwater Scandal

By October 23, 2007
The recent media coverage given to Blackwater misses the mark by calling for a "better war" in Iraq when there should be no war in Iraq. Guest blogger Norman Solomon argues that "Finding better poster boys who can be touted as humanitarians rather than mercenaries won't change the basic roles of gun-toting Americans in a country that they have no right to occupy."

‘struth

By October 14, 2007
it’s a fine American laggard sea found Haitian / with a boatload sinking under the precipice there / fallen into the new sink / in the new kitchen

Slick Torch

By October 5, 2007

By the time the star-spangled cover reached Sunday breakfast tables, NATO air attacks on Yugoslavia were underway; the U.S.-led bombing campaign would last for seventy-eight straight days.

Mambo Cinema

By October 1, 2007
Last night at the mambo cinema, with its wide screen / diamond sheen, my medulla oblongata / was knocked back to the Stone Age, primal scream / rising as I took my seat like a black sheep, Red Queen

The Ballad of Chris McCandless, 15 Years On

By September 21, 2007
It was fifteen years ago this month when the body of Christopher Johnson McCandless, a 24-year-old honors student from a well-to-do Virginia family, was discovered by moose hunters in an abandoned bus deep in the Alaskan wilderness. In the years since he died, McCandless’s life has become the stuff of legend, inspiring visitors from around […]

Glass

By September 16, 2007

“Just lie there,” he would say. “Pretend your hands are tied to the bed frame. Pretend you can’t move them.”

When Rasmussen Was King

By September 14, 2007
Individual and group. Man and machine. Body and spirit. Strategy and instinct. Effort and luck. Etiquette and pluck. And pain. Exquisite pain. Sure, this year’s Tour de France was marred by shame and sanctimony. But really, so what? It’s still the best, most dramatic competition there is and dammit, I was missing it before it was even over.

Two Poems

By September 14, 2007

Somewhere there is a perfect architecture / where light, form, shadow, space all move / to form a language beyond architecture, / where to dream of the wrong architecture / is to dream of dying.

Ireland 2.0

By September 13, 2007

Its Celtic Tiger economy has propelled Ireland from one of Europe’s poorest countries to one of its richest. But money doesn’t make the country. Why the Irish cultural identity must be re-imagined now.

Thomas Friedman: Hooked on War

By September 7, 2007
Though Thomas Friedman's patience with the war in Iraq may be running out, he can't seem to bring himself to renounce the war that he helped to launch and then blessed as the incarnation of virtue, which falls in line with his history of enthusiasm for war.

Seven Years in Hell: On Body Counts, Dead Zones, and an Empire of Stupidity

By September 6, 2007
On August 22nd the President addressed the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention, giving what is already known as his "Vietnam speech." That day, George W. Bush took the full-frontal plunge into the still-flowing current of the Big Muddy, fervently embracing Vietnam analogy-land and offering the first official presidential body count of the Iraq War.

Lovelier Near the End

By September 1, 2007
The fate of the inter- / office matchmaker // is to be forever / sitting on press // releases intuiting one / big happy time zone.

An Anecdote about Liam Rector (1949-2007)

By August 21, 2007

Liam Rector’s efforts to revitalize poetry were two-fold: both writing and encouraging great verse. Not every artist wants to work on the apparatus of his art—the less glamorous side of sitting on committees, founding programs, judging contests—but Liam seemed comfortable in the role of officiator.

Backspin for War: The Convenience of Denial

By August 17, 2007
The man who ran CNN news during the invasion of Iraq is now doing damage control in response to a new documentary’s evidence that he kowtowed to the Pentagon on behalf of the cable network. His denial says a lot about how “liberal media” outlets remain deeply embedded in the mindsets of pro-military conformity.

Thumb, Throat, Affidavit

By August 14, 2007
At this point your credit score / will be helpful. Turn in your old train tickets / and walk the way you have always walked, / feet turned out, heels light as oars.

Vanishing Point

By August 12, 2007

Writer Salar Abdoh considers the difference between “art” and “evidence” in modern day Iran—and discovers that when those roles overlap, images disappear.

8888 in Burma

By August 8, 2007
If you're cynical about politics, you need look no further than Aung San Suu Kyi for inspiration.

It’s Not About the Dog

By August 6, 2007
"How can you stand to live out here in the middle of nowhere, Iris?" she asks, as if this wasn't at one time her hometown too. She waits, but I am not going to play. She studies me. "Oh, I get it," she says. "You guys think you're safe.”

Cake

By August 6, 2007

A guy in a suit, I don't know him, walks by my cubicle holding one of the paper plates, his mouth full, chewing his last bite, folds the plate around his napkin and fork and cake crumbs, leans into my cubicle, reaches around a corner and stuffs the plate in my garbage can. No look, no excuse me, no nothing.

Future’s So Bright

By August 3, 2007

When the zebaleen, the garbage people of Cairo, were stripped of their responsibilities by the government, nothing but education could save them.

Love Tokens

By August 2, 2007

I'll give you a roll of barbwire / A vine for this modern epoch / Climbing all over our souls / That's our love, take it, don't ask

Rescue

By July 15, 2007

The hero arrives in an armada, years after you begin dreaming of him in black and white. // Armies stamp through your sleep, dole out chocolate, dried milk with a chalkiness

you long for.

Powerful Acts

By July 9, 2007
The actress cum activist on her campaign to end genocide in Darfur, and how China, Steven Spielberg and Kofi Annan have stood in her way

A Bloody Media Mirror

By July 5, 2007
Many of America’s most prominent journalists want us to forget what they were saying and writing more than four years ago to boost the invasion of Iraq. Now, they tiptoe around their own roles in hyping the war and banishing dissent to the media margins.

Jameson

By July 3, 2007
Jameson stayed silent for the rest of the ride, but secretly brooded over the fact that Rickter didn’t think he smiled enough. He smiled. That was something he did.

Warmish

By July 2, 2007

What we heard wasn't wisdom. Friends made suggestions, dumb things. I didn’t hear them or listen. I snoozed on painkillers, lay on linen.

F=ma

By July 1, 2007
The boy who knew the answers was very short, almost as short as me, a short girl. He had to shave every day early though—he was that kind of short. I’m the other kind, the kind that had to shave late. I did everything late. I’m still waiting for a lot of things to happen to me.

Coaches’ Night Out

By July 1, 2007
And there we were—the three of us—me and Regan on either side, the ugly girl in the middle, bobbing up and down with the music, her hips buried in Regan’s crotch, her hands on my shoulders. I spread my arms out like an eagle.

Double Reed

By July 1, 2007

when dusk says hand it over / what am I supposed to hand over // in printing you have to choose / between portrait or landscape

Aide

By July 1, 2007
Heartburn raced up her throat. Janet’s stomach bloated out in response. She felt her chest open and prepared to become a tunnel of God.

Not an Obituary for Nazik al-Malaika

By June 29, 2007
Every news outlet that I can think to check has published an obituary for Iraqi poet Nazik al-Malaika. While her significance in the Arab literary world is concrete, her poetry is little known in the United States. In fact, very few translations of her poems exist in English, making the outpouring of obits seem, to […]

New Translations of René Char

By June 22, 2007
He was hurled to the ground by the same unjust blows that hurtled him far ahead in his life, toward future years when one person alone could no longer make him bleed.

Moving Violations

By June 5, 2007

Abdoh contemplates the codes of modesty in Iran, and finds himself caught between a New York yoga class and the Caspian Sea.

America’s Favorite Poems, Or Why Tractors Are Sexy

By June 2, 2007
Reading at the kitchen table feels like homework, which is why I dislike the collected works of anyone who lived past thirty-five. If I can’t curl up with it, I don’t want it. Therefore I’m delighted that Robert Pinsky’s Favorite Poem Project is still available online, even if sparse compared to the three anthologies it […]

Wholesale Romania

By May 26, 2007

Yes, that’s right, maybe I’ve run out of / patience, we have certainly run out of cigarettes / and the later, as Cioran used to say // hold more fire than the Gospels in our blessed country.

Breathing in the Greenhouse Gases

By May 10, 2007
Are you tired, yet, of the omnipotence of greenhouse gases? You can’t swing a dead polar bear without hitting a story in a newspaper or magazine about how GHG (the street name for this uncontrolled substance) is causing natural or political calamities. We have to sober up from the past eight months when the environment […]

Messengers

By May 6, 2007
They'd been chosen for their stoic, no-nonsense demeanors. They weren't happy to be dead, and they'd all been taken quickly, violently, and much too young. None of them were much for conversation, but they found things to say to each other as they drove to and from assignments.

By Artifice Do We Shut Ourselves Away From Night

By May 6, 2007
I am playing the shepherd’s game with the Shepherdess far underground, by the secret lake, beneath a cyclorama on which, suitable to the evening hour, the blue of afternoon is deepening to plum, while, one by one, stars appear according to a lighting scheme designed by the hotel’s Electrician. When in the world, he lit the stage for Max Reinhart and other directors of German Expressionism. “Life is an illusion,” I tell the Shepherdess, my hand rummaging in her blouse.

The Missing Thing

By May 6, 2007
After a year, Phillip said they should try again. He told Muriel what she already knew—that such problems were all too common with first pregnancies. Pressing her hand, he repeated everything the doctors had told them.

Ashbery Turns Eighty, Still Rocks

By April 29, 2007
When I first made the discovery that living poets existed, John Ashbery was the reigning rock star. My well-meaning mentors hurried me away from his work and put W. S. Merwin in my hands. Pound for pound, it was a fair trade: both Pulitzer Prize winners; both born in 1927 (along with Galway Kinnell and […]

Average

By April 21, 2007
skywriting its name in the/ optical illusion blank spaces/ shifting around the surface/ of the necessary paperwork (also in mouth)

Two Poems

By April 15, 2007
soporific for the earthly,/ but for the waking,/ a buoyancy, the medium/ for floating up with/ flutter-kick, with wings

The Way I Am

By April 15, 2007
"I always do everything wrong. Sans exception./There I am again using 'sans' instead of 'without.'"

Eminent Domain

By April 5, 2007
She turned and lifted her windbreaker in back to show me the 14-inch, priceless George Washington bayonet, stolen out of the history lab and notched down the back of her jeans, the dagger-like tip wedged down the crack of her butt. “Jesus,” I said, grinning, “You carried it like that?”

Tadpoles

By March 23, 2007

"We’re not firefighters,” Francis said.

The skinny man laughed. “Did you hear that guys? They say they’re not firefighters,” he called to the other five men who hadn’t gotten up to greet us but were still sitting down, smoking and conversing. “Slater, you a firefighter?”

The man who apparently went by Slater smiled. “Hell no.”

Buick

By March 22, 2007
"He asked that his ashes be dumped in the Gowanus," I told them all. I put the lid back on the urn very carefully. The woman in the red dress adjusted her sateen shoulder strap. The car salesman began dusting off his knees, then stopped. Little bits of my father could very well have been clinging there.

The Price of Life

By March 20, 2007

Women are murdered in Guatemala so frequently that the phenomenon has been given a name: femicide. Despite worldwide calls for action, the problem seems only to be getting worse.

The Last Jews of Cairo

By November 8, 2006

Once there were more than 75,000. Today less than 100 remain. What led to the end of the once thriving Egyptian Jewish community, and how are the few who are left preserving their culture?

This Mere Guy

By October 27, 2006
The poet on his apprenticeship to Bidart, developing an effective "camouflage" and where the self lives in poetry.

Polar Bears on Thin Ice

By March 8, 2007
The environmental movement arguably started with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, serialized in the New Yorker in June 1962. By the time she died in 1964 from breast cancer, Ms. Carson shook up the American public, not to mention the chemical industry, and began the long march toward government mandated controls on the […]

Infidel

By February 27, 2007
Islam’s toughest critic on her new book, the Axis of Evil, and the neoconservatives’ moral high ground

Birdsongs East of the Rockies

By October 8, 2006
These sounds occupy many spaces, much like birds; there are the ones that rise upward and paint glorious arcs in the sky, and there are others that scale close to the ground or simply molt.

Myth-Busting: Feminism created sluttiness

By February 12, 2007
Sex-related anti-feminism generally falls in two categories: the argument that feminists are anti-sex (and by proxy anti-porn and anti-male) or, more recently, the idea that feminists are responsible for all the girls gone wild.

Karate Kid

By October 8, 2006
"I thought it was going to be about this kid who was really good at karate, but he wasn't. The kid wasn't good at anything."

Unintelligent Design

By January 18, 2007
The economic boom in China has meant the rise virtually overnight of a slew of new cities. But what are the costs? A talk with the artist/photographer on hyper-urbanization in China, with his photographs

Window

By September 11, 2006
The photographer on working in series, the personal roots of his current project, "Window," and September 11th.

Giant Killer

By August 25, 2006
The anti-Hillary candidate on the deaf media, war opportunism and building a progressive infrastructure.

Four Poems on War

By January 16, 2007
A few horses returned with torn flags we couldn’t make out. / I would have a ceremony for you, but what if you are alive?

Working Up to the Dragon

By August 13, 2006
“But you know the craziest thing, Steven?” he said. “I think the dragon was loose. Maybe my eyes were playing tricks because of the fog, but I swear there wasn’t a line attached to it. It swooped around the others, and then — whoosh! — it was gone."

Writing Without Borders

By January 14, 2007
The author discusses his decision to become a writer, the relationship between the individual and a nation, and his work as an opera librettist.

Sliding By

By July 31, 2006
Not surprisingly, Abie did well. If he had a talent, it was that he could sell anything to anyone: porn to a priest, whiskey to a teetotaler.

Three Poems

By July 20, 2006
The hedges, as square / as the capital letters important / books begin with, screen // the neighbor but not / his feet

MENU

By December 16, 2006

You never expect a zombie to lean over and bite you, so you don't really notice it before it's too late and the zombie apocalypse has begun. If you knew, you could easily outrun the slow moving ones. You could just walk a little faster and you’d be fine. The way they get you is that you don’t know that they are coming.

Fashionable

By December 15, 2006
Her face was too white and the skin was thickened and shadowed and defined by a deep rich pink luster and her house is filled with moquette furnishings.

The Cat’s Meow

By December 15, 2006
My daughter wears a jacket, like a book, but she is not a book, though she goes to the library. A book does not put other books under its jacket and walk away with them. My daughter tells me all the library books must be returned to the wood, and that is where she is taking them. She stacks them up into trunks and branches and tells them they are trees.

Thanks for 06!

By December 8, 2006
On the horizon: Ha Jin: the interview, India's (non-Bollywood) filmmakers, hyper-rapid urban renewal in China, Frederic Tuten/guest fiction editor, and the Guernica chap book (insert clever name here)...

A Brisk Walk

By June 14, 2006
The former poet laureate on attacking pretension, daring to be accessible, and i-poetry.

Who is John Conyers?

By May 22, 2006
As Republicans attempt to preemptively discredit the Congress’s oversight role, Conyers discusses why he won’t let go

The Body is Still Warm

By April 30, 2006

Our love was probably less sexual than total, Californian in its appreciation of the other’s physical being, an annexation of identity.

Two Doctors

By April 30, 2006

Two doctors, married to each other. At first it was doctor and nurse skulking dark corridors in heat and finding empty gurneys, then doctor on doctor.

Mardi Gras 2006 / Gentilly: Party at Ground Zero

By April 12, 2006
 I have been to New Orleans many times, but I had never been down for Mardi Gras. This year I went down to take the emotional temperature of the city, six months after the devastation of hurricane Katrina. I found, amid the piles of renovation rubble and vast stretches of empty homes, that this city which is so unique and so rich in culture and tradition has not lost its sense of self, and that the people who make New Orleans what it is have no intention of giving up.

Mardi Gras 2006 /Ash Wednesday

By April 12, 2006
 This year’s Mardi Gras was like a city-wide barbecue, an open-air party in what is essentially a disaster zone that is also everyone's home. Now, the party is over, and since I hadn’t been able to before, I take a ride out to see the hardest-hit areas of the city.

High Noon

By March 26, 2006
By this glass of wine so dark it brims / Like rising nightfall, with a heart whose deepest faith / Is insatiable thirst

Gods of History

By March 16, 2006
"They’re looking down upon us after Rwanda, saying, 'You know, we’re going to give you another chance. This time we’re gonna give you lots of time.'"

Catapult

By January 24, 2006
The flinch of it lingers // As I exchange my insides for the front of the line

Trip to Saigon

By November 29, 2005

I tell myself I bought the painting as a souvenir, a memory in the French sense. But really it is my consolation for not finding out Amy’s name.

Yes

By October 24, 2005
The innovative writer/director discusses her latest film, venturing into uncharted territory, and how A.O. Scott got her movie wrong.

The Waves

By September 27, 2005

It wasn't him they were so worried about. It was the half dozen grenades still wrapped to his wetsuit.

Douglas

By September 27, 2005

My wife and I were kick-ass archeologists. Found all kinds of old, important shit out in the jungle, dealing with dangerous natives, applying for grants.

Stone

By September 27, 2005
This is sanity—when love comes—/to offer a bed, a chair,/sustain and raise it like a pet

Telling Details

By September 26, 2005
Banks discusses his time in Students for a Democratic Society, finding a narrator's voice, and his (brief) acting career.

Writing the Playwright

By June 28, 2005
"In a sense, I feel like the job of the artist at all times is essentially the same, which is simply to tell the truth. I mean, I’m nervous about any prescriptions for what a writer should or shouldn’t do."

New Europe Grows Old

By June 28, 2005

Bush's desire that Eastern Europeans support any adventure to which the U.S. attaches the 'freedom' label depends on a vision of Europe that's already outdated.

The Bypass

By June 23, 2005
They were children circumnavigating a haunted house, / trekking into private property

Two Poems

By June 23, 2005
Then you fell / like something fancy and on fire in my lap / and there’s no going home for me.

Riding with Critical Mass

By May 4, 2005
This has nothing to do with the current orange alert; in fact, it has nothing to do with terrorist threats or any sort of threat at all. This is the City of New York’s response to a bicycle ride called “Critical Mass.”

Aceh Abandoned: The Second Tsunami

By May 4, 2005
After a 13-year break, the U.S. is trying to improve relations with the Indonesian military. It is letting go of its concern about Indonesia’s human rights record that led Congress to curb military ties in 1992 and cut off Indonesia’s eligibility to buy certain kinds of lethal military equipment.

Tintin in the New World

By May 4, 2005

“You must find me very queer then, Madame Clavdia. I’m sorry if I disconcert you,” Tintin said, his voice low, his eyes downcast.

Learning to See Abundance in Liberia

By May 4, 2005
President James Monroe christened Liberia ''a little America, destined to shine gem-like in the heart of darkest Africa.'' If Monroe's language is anachronistic, his optimism is not; what we have spawned, we can help renew.

The Name of the Father

By May 3, 2005

Cowering behind an almost idiotic silence, I avoided looking into his eyes, gripped by the same fear that must have gripped Odysseus as he ran from the singular gaze of the Cyclops.

Conversing With the World

By May 3, 2005

Artists are more capable than theorists or pundits in representing the consciousness of the people, because the language of art is a language of immediacy, of spirit, and of the transporting analogy.

The Magic Box

By May 2, 2005

Her parents were naked, one on top of the other. Their eyes were closed, their faces contorted; they were breathing loudly and moaning. She watched them for a few moments, terrified; then she walked quietly back to her cot and covered her face with the pillow.

Midwinter

By May 2, 2005

A blue glow / Streams out from my clothes. / Midwinter. / A clinking tambour made of ice. / I close my eyes. / Somewhere

Samantha Power: Witness to Genocide

By May 2, 2005
"The only long-term way that the terrorist threat will be neutralized is to improve human dignity, and shore up failed states like Afghanistan, like Darfur, so that they don’t become a breeding ground for more people hostile to the United States."

Oscar Arias Sánchez: President of Peace

By May 1, 2005
As he gears up for another term as president, Costa Rica’s Oscar Arias talks about waging peace, winning the Nobel, and quips, “Al Qaeda has received a great deal of support and training over the years from the U.S. What’s important about mentioning these connections is to prevent the same mistake from being repeated again.”

Aswim with Happiness

By April 29, 2005
Our ideas leap like fish upstream / to spawn and die in / sunlight / their backs/flecked with blood / their eyes ruinous and open.

Noon

By January 26, 2005
Already the ship hovers, a soft mark near the harbor, / the ashen shore unsure if it is approaching land / or leaving, its curved back—that long labor—rocking land

Weeping Icons

By January 26, 2005
One stunned passerby will drop a bottle of cranberry juice on the pavement. / You’ll blink, surprised it doesn’t shatter holding in the red lake of its lung.

Harvest & Walking Home

By January 25, 2005

Tonight the lares have eaten their offerings. / The sweetbreads are gone, black kidneys / Infantine and nacred as mollusk-eggs. The smoke / Circles and begins to clear.

Absinthe

By January 25, 2005
But your eyelids hold such flowery perfume, / that they breed inside my mind the bastard’s doom

February

By January 25, 2005
It’s a special kind of frigidity, / a cold no man’s meager skin is match for...

Two Stories

By January 21, 2005

Are your recollections really recent or do they reflect a remote past? You feel as if time is not time on the clock, and an aura of unreality surrounds you.

Too Big

By January 20, 2005

Nothing like a deadly catastrophe to make journalists and nations look important. And nothing like the next news cycle to shake all that importance loose again.

On the Road with Ralph Nader

By October 27, 2004

Will someone write a book about America’s historic rejection of third party candidates at the beginning of the millennium? And if they do, will anybody read it?

The Hard-To-Say

By October 27, 2004
"Poetry articulates and enacts the difficult-to-say, the half-known; it finds a music and a shape, offers an arrangement of words and sentences that better approximate the way things are."

Catholics as ‘Values Voters’

By October 27, 2004

If there is any one lesson to be learned from this election, social theorists are going to have to revise slightly what one means by not only the “values voter”, but the “religious right” in this country.

Ions

By October 27, 2004

We sleep in sleeping bags on the beach, so in order to get close to you I have to slip out of mine first, then slip you out of yours.