ideological criminal

Howard Friel and Richard Falk’s The Record of the Paper: How the New York Times Misreports Us Foreign Policy (Verso, 2004) is a blistering indictment of the New York Times coverage of foreign policy over the past fifty years, with particular emphasis on the years following September 11, 2001, the invasion and subsequent occupation and […]

When I was in Frankfurt in late September, I went to the Museum für Moderne Kunst and happened to catch the opening of Taryn Simon’s An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar. I was blown away. Simon’s photography is both stunning in its asthetics and astounding in its subjects. Moreover, the […]

Jeremy Scahill won me over when we was reporting for Democracy Now! on the 2004 presidential election. Wesley Clark was in New Hampshire campaigning just days before the primary. The usual campaign coverage is a about as informative as a dog turd. Everyone is in softie mode– journalists, politicians, public citizens. And in the midst […]

Below is a brutal and hilarious affront to the Brandeis administration, written as a letter to the editor of the campus newspaper, The Hoot, in response to the recent actions taken against Donald Hindley, professor of Politics. The incident is recounted in Inside Higher Ed’s article Sending in the Class Monitor.
Letter to the editor: […]

Reading bell hooks today, I came across this:
In retrospect, I see that in the last twenty years I have encountered many folks who say they are committed to freedom and justice for all even though the way they live, the values and habits of being they institutionalize daily, in public and private rituals, help maintain […]

The Yes Men have struck again (photos, videos, and links):
Imposters posing as ExxonMobil and National Petroleum Council (NPC) representatives delivered an outrageous keynote speech to 300 oilmen at GO-EXPO, Canada’s largest oil conference, held at Stampede Park in Calgary, Alberta, today [June 14, 2007].
The speech was billed beforehand by the GO-EXPO organizers as the major […]

Tanya Reinhart has apparently died of a stroke in New York. Reinhart was one of the few critics of Israel that I felt could consistently be relied upon for sharp, correct, and just analysis of Israeli policy and advocacy for Palestinian rights. So many other intellectual big hitters have […]

My good friend Aaron Fishbone has just published a book, The Struggle for Water: Increasing Demands on a Vital Resource. The synopsis from Powell’s reads:
This title brings together a wide variety of materials on the issues and controversies surrounding the complex subject of water ownership and freshwater privatization. It presents a general overview […]

While I was reading Ali Abunimah’s excellent book One Country, I came across a passage about Danae Elon’s film Another Road Home, which I put at the top of my Netflix queue and recently watched. Elon is the daughter of the noted Israeli author and former Ha’aretz correspondent Amos Elon, an outspoken critic of […]

Last night, I spent my snowy Valentine’s evening at the Cambridge Forum’s hosting of Chris Hedges, who spoke about his latest book, American Fascists: the Christian Right and War on America (right now, the #3 bestseller on Powell’s). He spent fifteen years at the New York Times and was part of the team that […]