As the insane 2016 US presidential campaign enters its final weeks, we are with new urgency forced to question the role of American power in the world. In this charged moment, Noam Chomsky’s new book ...
Tag: Human Rights
Waste, Value, and Environmental Racism in the Southwest
On August 5, 2015, a team contracted by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to investigate a leak at the Gold King mine in Silverton, Colorado, accidentally breached the mine, sending three ...
Turkey’s Progressive Past
In her posthumously published memoir, written in the late 1960s, the journalist Sabiha Sertel reflected on her life in exile from Turkey, her home country. She had lived through a period of ...
Retrofitting Totalitarianism
No sooner did the Western media learn to think of Vladimir Putin as an authoritarian ruler than the Russian regime changed again. Since Putin returned to the office of president in March 2012, Russia has experienced ...
Illegals
At the height of the refugee crisis in Germany, the following slogans made their appearance on the Hamburg streets: Wir sind alle illegal (We are all illegal) paired with Kein mensch ist illegal (No ...
Can Child Soldiers Be Saved?
Everybody loves stories about child soldiers, it seems, as long as redemption is involved. A memoir about Sierra Leone’s civil war, for example, is not exactly the feel-good stuff you’d expect to see ...
Totalitarian Sprawl
Was the Soviet Union a totalitarian state, ruled by a highly centralized power and demanding absolute subservience from its citizens? Or was it instead a more complex polity, one that only projected ...
Suffragettes Take Hollywood
An industrial laundry in 1912 London, the steam infusing the air, the sweat on the workers’ faces so vivid the viewer herself feels the heat. These laundries were not only literal sweatshops; they ...
Breaking Down Walls at the Havana Biennial
The Malecón, Havana’s five miles of curving, spray-soaked seawall and esplanade, is both magnificent and intimate. Since the early 20th century, it has been the site for evening promenades, a meeting ...
Russia, Today: Part 1
Amid the annexation of Crimea, the frozen conflict in eastern Ukraine, and an emerging proxy war in Syria, many commentators have proclaimed the beginning of a new Cold War between Russia and the ...
Saving Muslim Women
The 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris—along with the brutal activities of ISIS—have spurred a resurgence of concern about Islam in Western media. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof fretted ...
A Letter to My Children about the Supreme Court’s Ruling on Marriage Equality
Many parents struggle with how to talk to their kids about marriage equality. In what follows, a former Supreme Court law clerk, top appellate litigator ...
The Algebra of Justice
The Underground Railroad is among the most celebrated instances of civil disobedience in US history. But, though famous and beloved, it’s cloaked in mystery. As an extralegal, clandestine operation ...
Can There Be a Feminist World?
The following is the lightly edited text of a lecture delivered on November 16, 2013, at the Columbia University Global Center in Amman, Jordan. I am pleased to be here at the Columbia Global Center ...
“It’s When There Are a Lot of Them That There Are Problems”
The sorrow and outrage provoked by the attacks on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were underwritten by an all-too-familiar grand narrative: These were not the cowardly misdeeds of a group ...
Safe Space
The geography of gay life has shifted dramatically over the past decades. In 1949, Jean Genet’s Thief’s Journal described homosexuality as located almost exclusively in spaces of moral depredation—in ...
Those Refugees
While most Americans were looking forward to this past Independence Day, an ugly scene was unfolding in Murrieta, California. Patriotic citizens, armed with placards that read “America has been ...
Can Drones Have Ethics?
In this interview, Claire Richard and media studies professor Peter Asaro discuss the history of drone warfare and the troubling proliferation of new technologies that can surveil and kill from a ...
Caught in the Game
The Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh devotes just over a minute of his documentary, The Missing Picture (released in the US in March), to the work of Ang Saroeung, a Khmer Rouge cameraman who filmed ...
Progress and Execution
Frantz Schmidt hanged his first thief when he was 19, on a June day in 1573. Either his father or another master executioner pronounced the hanging “executed adroitly,” concluding Frantz’s ...