Empires advance and empires retreat, though not in circumstances of their own choosing — to borrow from one Karl Marx — and certainly never smoothly or without upending entire regions, countries and societies in their wake. With this in mind, what unfolded in Afghanistan a year ago with the panicked…

Ukraine’s President Volodymer Zelensky is one man who’s been on a journey these past few months, which on a certain level is entirely understandable given that he finds himself leading a country engaged in a fierce conflict with its immediate neighbor, Russia. The problem is that at a time when…

When the US B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, arrived over Hiroshima early on the morning of August 6, 1945 its nuclear payload symbolized the exaltation of death, destruction, and brute force as the summit of an Enlightenment that ushered into being the liberal values that underpin Western democracy. Those values…

That Israel is an apartheid state engaged in the systematic and structural oppression of the Palestinian people is an objective fact. As is the illegality of the occupation of the West Bank. As is the continuing establishment and expansion of settlements across the West Bank and East Jerusalem. And as…

Nancy Pelosi’s recklessly provocative visit to the breakaway Chinese province of Taiwan will have far-reaching consequences for Sino-US relations going forward. That one aged US Senator and senior Washington functionary believes that the road to stability and peace in East Asia will be served by triggering an international incident is…

One of the most bitter public feuds in the history of American letters raged between Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal from the early 1970s all the way into the mid-eighties, when they finally reconciled. It was conducted in print and in person during various joint television appearances, most spectacularly on…

The need for meaning and transcendence that informs the human condition in the midst of the chaos that is late stage capitalism is such that oftentimes the grotesquerie of the spectacle is embraced as an antidote to grim reality; vanity is prized over humility; and celebrity is valued more than…

The othering and scapegoating of minorities — refugees, Muslims, migrants et al. — is the moral and ethical blight of our age. …

The Fourth of July is America’s Independence Day, one of the most important dates in the nation’s calendar. It is a day when myth and hypocrisy collide. In 1852 Frederick Douglass, the self educated former slave and towering champion of the country’s abolitionist movement, was invited to deliver the keynote…