Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: Our Casualties
We were living at the Mount Clinton Internally Displaced Refugee camp outside of Roseville the day his death news came in. It struck something throughout the camp of thousands, like an axe cutting through hard wood…
Video: The Nazi Officer’s Wife
Edith Hahn was an outspoken young woman in Vienna when the Gestapo forced her into a ghetto and then into a slave labor camp. When she returned home months later, she knew she would become a hunted woman and went underground. Then she met Werner Vetter, a Nazi Party member who fell in love with her.
Bill Moyers, Heather Cox Richardson: The Day the Confederate Flag Flew in the United States Capitol
What happened in the 1850s and what happened in the present are very similar in a number of ways, though the symbol of the insurrectionist Confederate army never flew in that nation’s capitol—not once—until January 6, 2021.
Eileen Flanagan: Despite flagrant assault on the Capitol, the pillars of democracy are holding
Trump overplayed his hand. As scary and sad as it is, this is a great last memory for Americans to have of his presidency.
Walden Bello: The United States Has Entered a Frightening Weimar Era
The violent storming of the Capitol by pro-Trump extremists underlines the face of crises to come.
Jake Johnson: Co-Conspirators in Sedition
Here Are the Names of Every Republican Who Voted to Overturn Election Results.
Tom Engelhardt: Saying Goodbye to the Con-Man-in-Chief
De-mining America After The Donald
Mary Kate Cary, Robert A. Strong: America’s newest voters look back at the 2020 election – and forward to politics in 2021
We each taught college courses on the 2020 campaigns while they were underway, and as a result had a sort of three-month-long focus-grouplike conversation with the newest American voters.
Rachel Hadas: Shouldering
The students’ questions pound relentlessly.
Dream father, bird of omen, oh tell me –
the lost, the hungry, the abandoned – who
will take care of them?
Sunnivie Brydum: 11 Better Ideas for a Country in Need of Social Change
Even nations with long histories of inequality and violence carry lessons for how to move toward what might be called a more perfect union.
Andrew Bacevich: Reflections on Vietnam and Iraq
Virtually all Democrats and many in the media ascribe to Donald Trump full blame for the mess in which this country finds itself. Yet Americans would do well to temper their expectations of what supplanting Trumpism with Bidenism is likely to produce.
Christine Fair: The Revenge of Farkhunda
The mullah falsely accused Farkhunda of burning a Quran. Those who overheard the allegation immediately decided that she must be killed. She was beaten with bats, stomped upon, and driven over by a car after which her body was dragged by a car and then immolated. Her real crime? She had the temerity as a woman to challenge superstitious practices propounded by ignorant male clerics.
Rebecca Gordon: It’s Almost Twenty Years Since 9/11
Perhaps the horrors of 2020—the fires and hurricanes, Trump’s vicious attacks on democracy, the death, sickness, and economic dislocation caused by Covid-19—can force a real conversation about national security in 2021. Maybe this time we can finally ask whether trying to prop up a dying empire actually makes us—or indeed the world—any safer.
Mike Schneider: Photograph in TIME, 1985
A man in battle camouflage holds a machete
at the throat of a peasant farmer on his knees
genuflecting in a shallow grave he just dug.
