Apocalypse Now? The Evolution of Trump’s Policies Towards Iran

In a March 30, 2025, telephone interview with Kristen Welker of NBC News, U.S. President Donald Trump stated: “If they [the Iranians] don’t make a deal, there will be bombing.  It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen.”  This vitriolic statement was reflective of Donald Trump’s desire to remake the Persian…

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A Termite’s Guide to Undermining SNAP

Conservatives long have had it in for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps.[1] Ronald Reagan hated it so much that he refused to reverse severe program cuts even when faced with mounting hunger amidst a deep recession, choosing instead to send surplus “government cheese” to states to distribute to the…

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The Government Attack on Public Health Research

I have been conducting transdisciplinary research on HIV/AIDS, COVID, overdose, and related topics for over forty years. In my HIV research, I have had to try to understand a virus that, without intervention, destroys its host human body within about ten years—which might look like a recipe for a viral disease’s self-destruction.  Underlying this, however,…

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American Higher Education in the Era of Trump

Introduction: The Faustian Bargain Higher education in America long ago sold its soul to corporate America. Whether through its heavy dependence on corporate funding for business schools and scientific research, the rebranding of students as “customers,” the evisceration of tenure to promote flexibility in hiring, or the adoption of top-down, management-heavy infrastructures, universities have steadily…

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A Socialist Mayor for New York? What History Suggests

In the spring of 1910 newspapers around the country speculated about what was going to happen in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as the result of the election of a Socialist mayor in that city.  The mayor, Emil Seidel, tried to calm the fears of those who predicted a dangerous revolution was about to take place. Still, after…

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The Metonymy of Light: Three Early Works by Stan Brakhage

At the heart of preeminent American avant-gardist Stan Brakhage’s cinema, there lies a central tension or struggle between abstraction and representation. Film critic and Brakhage chronicler Fred Camper has posited The Riddle of Lumen (1972) as a kind of central work in this regard, arguing for that film as a turning point in Brakhage’s work…

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On Michael J. Thompson’s Twilight of the Self

Michael J. Thompson’s Twilight of the Self is a highly sophisticated theoretical analysis of the present day, deeply informed by the first generation of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Thompson reawakens the antecedents and the legacies of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and updates them for the twenty-first century. The book demands much…

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