Browse Topics

Venice Shimmers

Meanwhile, less than a day’s drive from here, the fighting continues in Bosnia, where tens of thousands have been killed or displaced, where starvation and concentration camps and rape hotels have become weapons in a campaign of ethnic extermination. Yet Washington is by and large indifferent, as Bosnia sits on no oil fields and sends neither Democrats nor Republicans to Congress.

Conjuring Tibet

Turning youths loose on actual or possible dissidents was probably the shrewdest and cruelest of Maoist strategies. Here were True Believers, lacking life experience to complicate their thoughts, still endowed with the primal cruelty of children. Having internalized the rhetoric of the Cultural Revolution, they were empowered to indulge in any form of torture, from breast amputation to castration, secure in the righteousness of their cause.

The Revolution

Words Of Honor

An Interview With Barbara Kingsolver

Some people are able to separate the personal from the political. I know some extremely conservative people who don’t dislike my company or my books. They can tolerate a different view in their lives, but without thinking about it much or respecting it. But the reverse isn’t true. I don’t know very many leftists who could, for example, marry a Republican, or easily cohabit with fascist thinking. I suppose that’s the difference between politics as a sort of hobby and politics as fighting for your life.

Three Tales Of The Revolution

In 1913, my great-aunt Adela ran away with a boy intent on joining Pancho Villa’s revolutionary Army of the North. She was sixteen. The Revolution promised freedom from tyrants such as Díaz, Huerta, and her own father the rurales captain. Only her youngest brother did not disown her.

Odyssey Of Resistance

An Interview With Daniel Berrigan

Americans don’t generally think of the consequences of war. We have grown calloused souls, with the help of a duplicitous leadership, an inert Congress, a morally cloudy church, and the jingoistic media. Add to this our historically embedded racism and you have a poisonous brew indeed, hardening hearts against thought or concern for the slaughtered innocents of Iraq.

Hero With A Thousand Faces

One of Bill Clinton’s favorite movies, according to the newspaper, is High Noon. It’s one of my favorites, too, a classic Western about a lone man standing up against evil. I watched it again the weekend before the inauguration.

The Fence Posts

Visiting my hometown of Daruvar, Croatia, in 1986, I was taken aback when a friend told me, “Go back to the States! We’ll have a war here. Serbs have lists of all the Croatian households. At night they will slit our throats.” I thought he was crazy. Now I think I was crazy not to see the warning signs.

Letter To The President

The American system is intended to find the candidate who most wants to be president. The parliamentary system elects the most qualified candidate; the American system elects the most ambitious one.

The Vet

Facing Mike on my doorstep, dressed in my Lands’ End polo shirt and my all-cotton cargo shorts, I felt I was being visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past. Looking at this man, who must have been born in the late forties or early fifties, a man who grew up, as I did, on hula hoops and Twinkies and later the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and who now looked immeasurably old and broken, I knew we were feeling a similar pain just then. I knew he understood that we’d been through the same time and had come out differently.