Browse Topics

President In My Heart

If The World Were A Village Of 1,000 People

If the world were a village of 1,000 people, it would include: 584 Asians; 124 Africans; 95 eastern and western Europeans; 84 Latin Americans; 55 former Soviets (including Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and other national groups); 52 North Americans; 6 Australians and New Zealanders.

Their Turn

To the melancholy wailing of a Turkish flute, the dervishes enter the stage dressed in long black coats and tall woolen hats. It’s a dramatic moment even if you haven’t done your homework.

Free Radical

An Interview With Noam Chomsky

Up until December 1967, almost everybody had been a hawk. Starting in February 1968, everybody who was not a dove was saying they had been all along. If you look at the Kennedy-era intellectuals, they have two versions of what happened: the memoirs they wrote before the Tet Offensive and the books they wrote after it. These are radically different. Before Tet, there is no hint that anyone wanted to withdraw from Vietnam. The books after Tet are full of explanations about how Kennedy had plans to withdraw from Vietnam. The game was over by then, of course, and they wanted to cover their asses.

The President’s Arms Are Like Oak Branches

Standing At The Wall

On its surface death meets life, the past meets the present. What was, doesn’t accuse; what is, doesn’t apologize. But this is the one place in America where they face each other, like it or not, beyond cant, revision, and lies.

The Joy Of Sales Resistance

This is a book about sales resistance. We live in a time when technologies and ideas (often the same thing) are adopted in response not to need but to advertising, salesmanship, and fashion. Salesmen and saleswomen now hover about us as persistently as angels, intent on “doing us good” according to instructions set forth by persons educated at great public expense in the arts of greed and prevarication. These salespeople are now with most of us, apparently, even in our dreams.

Stuck

The map I left for my wife merely depicted a mountain a hundred miles north of home, and I was twenty miles from the pavement. Soon the sun would be out of sight, and everyone knows what happens on a warm night in the desert when the sun goes down: the snakes come out. And the Mojave green rattler was indigenous to the area. While it was true I had a snakebite kit, it was also true that you can’t walk far once bitten and even bites that are nonlethal can result in permanent crippling.

Krome

“Krome was set up on an abandoned missile base in the middle of a swamp. It’s big enough to hold about a thousand people, but they’ve got to have twice that many there now. All kinds of human rights violations. Not enough toilets, not enough water. These people haven’t done anything, but they’re being treated worse than convicted criminals. They even put hormones in the food to keep the men from rioting. It’s a concentration camp. You’ll see,” he promises me.

On The F Train

Rising out of Brooklyn / the Statue of Liberty