Living on the Wrong World:A Planetary Cease-Fire Is Desperately Needed
On this planet of ours, it almost doesn’t matter who’s right and who’s wrong when it comes to our wars. Actually, let me correct that thought slightly: it certainly does…
On this planet of ours, it almost doesn’t matter who’s right and who’s wrong when it comes to our wars. Actually, let me correct that thought slightly: it certainly does…
I was born on July 20, 1944, almost two years after Joe Biden arrived on this planet and almost a year before You Know Who, like me, landed in New…
Honestly, what strange creatures we are. Nothing stops us when it comes to destruction, does it? (And I’m not even thinking about the utter, ongoing devastation of Gaza.) I mean,…
Imagine this: humanity in its time on Earth has already come up with two distinct ways of destroying this planet and everything on it. The first is, of course, nuclear…
Let’s admit it: We are indeed mad creatures. This should truly have been the time of our discontent. The northern hemisphere just experienced the hottest summer in recorded history, including month by…
Tell me, what planet are we actually on? All these decades later, are we really involved in a “second” or “new” Cold War? It’s certainly true that, as late as…
From the earliest kingdoms to late last night, history has been the story not just of the rise of great powers but of their decline and fall. So, normally, there…
Hey, who knows? It could be the Gulf Stream collapsing or the planet eternally breaking heat records. But whatever the specifics, we’re living it right now, not in the next century, the…
In case you hadn’t noticed — and how could you not? — there have been more than 500 (yes, 500-plus!) wildfires burning across the vast reaches of Canada, an unheard-of number, and…
As it turns out, it’s never too late. I mention that only because last week, at nearly 79, I managed to visit Mars for the first time. You know, the…
After almost 79 years on this beleaguered planet, let me say one thing: this can’t end well. Really, it can’t. And no, I’m not talking about the most obvious issues…
I was born on July 20, 1944, amid a vast global conflict already known as World War II. Though it ended with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in…
Indulge me for a moment. This is how “The Prophecy” in my 1962 high school yearbook began. It was written by some of my classmates in the year we graduated from…
Can there be any question that we’re in a mad — and loud — new age of McCarthyism? Thank you, Kevin! And don’t forget the wildly over-the-top members of the so-called Freedom…
Let me start 2023 with a glance back at a December news moment that caught my eye. To do so, however, I have to offer a bit of explanation. First,…
Believe me, it’s strange to be an old man and feel like you’re living on a new planet. On November 7th, the day before the midterm elections, I took my…
Oddly enough, I’ve read obituaries with fascination from the time I was quite young. And yet, in all these years, I’ve never really reflected on that fact. I don’t know…
Honestly, if you had described this America to me more than half a century ago, I would have laughed in your face. Donald Trump becoming president? You must be kidding!…
I find nothing strange in Joe Biden, at 79 (going on 80), being the oldest president in our history and possibly planning to run again in 2024. After all, who wouldn’t want…
In recent weeks, a newly emboldened right-wing Supreme Court struck down a more than century-old New York law restricting the carrying of concealed weapons and a nearly 50-year-old precedent on abortion. Meanwhile, the…
Once upon a time, long, long ago — actually, it was early in the year 2000 — I was involved in publishing Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. It…
Face it, we’re living in a world that, while anything but exceptional, is increasingly the exception to every rule. Only the other day, 93-year-old Noam Chomsky had something to say…
A Historical Feast of Death and Destruction from the Peloponnesian Wars to Late Tomorrow Night Excuse me if I wander a little today — and if it bothers you, don’t…
He’s our very own emperor from hell, an updated version of Nero who, in legend, burned down Rome on a whim, though ours prefers drowning Washington. Why, just the other day,…
Sometimes life has a way of making you realize things about yourself. Recently, I discovered that an urge of mine, almost four decades old, had been the very opposite of…
Imagine that you were experiencing all of this (and by this, I mean our lives right now) as if it were a novel, à la Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. The…
Let me start 2022 by heading back — way, way back — for a moment. It’s easy to forget just how long this world has been a dangerous place for…
Whether the pandemic that’s swept the world started from a bat or not, as 2021 ends, I think it’s safe to say that we’re all far battier than we were when it…
Our World Is Increasingly Like a Science-Fiction Novel Who knew that Martians, inside monstrous tripodal machines taller than many buildings, actually ululated, that they made eerily haunting “ulla, ulla, ulla,…
On February 17, 1941, less than 10 months before the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor and the U.S. found itself in a global war, Henry Luce, in an editorial in Life magazine (which…
What a way to end a war! Apologies all around! We’re so damn sorry — or actually, maybe not! I’m thinking, of course, about CENTCOM commander General Kenneth F. McKenzie,…
They weren’t kidding when they called Afghanistan the “graveyard of empires.” Indeed, that cemetery has just taken another imperial body. And it wasn’t pretty, was it? Not that anyone should be…
Admittedly, I hadn’t been there for 46 years, but old friends of mine still live (or at least lived) in the town of Greenville, California, and now… well, it’s more…
It was all so long ago, in a world seemingly without challengers. Do you even remember when we Americans lived on a planet with a recumbent Russia, a barely rising…
Yes, once upon a time I regularly absorbed science fiction and imagined futures of wonder, but mainly of horror. What else could you think, if you read H.G. Wells’s War of…
Let me start with my friend and the boat. Admittedly, they might not seem to have anything to do with each other. The boat, a guided-missile destroyer named the USS Curtis…
Here’s the strange thing in an ever-stranger world: I was born in July 1944 in the midst of a devastating world war. That war ended in August 1945 with the…
By the time you read this piece, it will already be out of date. The reason’s simple enough. No matter what mayhem I describe, with so much all-American weaponry in…
Here’s one of the things I now do every morning. I go to the online Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center and check out the figures there — global coronavirus cases and deaths,…
Like Gregor Samsa, the never-to-be-forgotten character in Franz Kafka’s story “The Metamorphosis,” we awoke on January 7th to discover that we, too, were “a giant insect” with “a domelike brown…
Joe Biden’s got a problem — and so do I. And so, in fact, do we. At 76 years old, you’d think I’d experienced it all when it comes to…
2021 has indeed begun and god knows what it has in store for us. But unless, somehow, we’re surprised beyond imagining, The Donald is indeed going to leave the White…
What If, After 9/11, George W. Bush Had Thrown Parties? And What If, After the Pandemic Arrived, Donald J. Trump Had Launched a Global War on Covid-19? 'Tis the season…
We’re now living in an age of opacity, as Rudy Giuliani pointed out in a courtroom recently. Here was the exchange: “‘In the plaintiffs’ counties, they were denied the opportunity to…
In 2016 as now, he was the candidate of chaos. Yes, he was a billionaire (or wanna-be billionaire or in-hock billionaire, not to mention a liar, a cheat, and a scoundrel), but from the beginning…
It was summer almost half a century ago when I got into that Volkswagen van and began my trip across country with Peter, a photographer friend. I was officially doing…
Yes, when he was running for president, he did indeed say: "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's,…
It was August 2017 and Donald Trump had not yet warmed up to Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s portly dictator. In fact, in typical Trumpian fashion, he was pissed at the…
The year was 1991 and the United States was suddenly the globe’s lone superpower, its ultimate hyperpower, the last and greatest of its kind, the soon-to-be-indispensable nation. The only one…
Let me be blunt. This wasn’t the world I imagined for my denouement. Not faintly. Of course, I can’t claim I ever really imagined such a place. Who, in their…
It’s July 2020 and I’m about to turn 76, which, as far as I’m concerned, officially makes me an old man. So put up with my aging, wandering brain here,…
Let me rant for a moment. I don’t do it often, maybe ever. I’m not Donald Trump. Though I’m only two years older than him, I don’t even know how…
Class of 2020, wherever you are, I had planned to address you on this graduation day. But how can I? Yes, I know that former President Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Tom Hanks all took…
“Be assured of one thing: whichever candidate you choose at the polls in November, you aren’t just electing a president of the United States; you are also electing an assassin-in-chief.”…
Let me quote a Trumpian figure from long ago, Henry Ford. That’s right, the bigot who created the Ford Motor Company (and once even ran for president). Back in 1916, in an interview…
The other morning, walking at the edge of a local park, I caught sight of a beautiful red cardinal, the first bird I ever saw some 63 years ago. Actually, to…
My first question is simple enough: After 18-plus years of our forever wars, where are all the questions? Almost two decades of failing American wars across a startlingly large part…
Let me betray my age for a moment. Some of you, I know, will be shocked, but I still read an actual newspaper. Words on real paper every day. I’m…
Yes, our infrastructure stinks, our schools are failing, this country’s a nightmare of inequality, and there’s a self-promoting madman in the White House, so isn’t it time to take pride in the rare institutional…
Here's the question at hand -- and I guarantee you that you’ll read it here first: Is Donald Trump the second or even possibly the third 9/11? Because truly, he…
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