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.
Medea Benjamin, Nicolas J.S. Davies: Ten Foreign Policy Fiascos Biden Can Start Fixing on Day One
Biden can immediately reverse some of Trump’s most disastrous decisions. And each one can set the stage for broader progressive foreign policy initiatives.
John Samuel Tieman: Lauds
the Templar strolled the cloister
after the dawn office
the sky was a sort of orange
like he had seen in the East
William D. Hartung & Mandy Smithberger: Shrinking the Pentagon
Will the Biden administration dare cut military spending?
Majid Naficy: Censoring Love
Suddenly, I remember Ezzat
Who was shot in Evin Prison
And buried in the Cemetery of the Infidels
In a mass grave without any gravestones.
Rachel Hadas: Shopping Upstairs
Terror, stasis, glints of hope.
Ghosts of evils that came before,
plague and depression, civil war,
take on new life. So here we are.
Robert Wrigley: What She Said
She said to him, Oh, Jack, what have they done?
