Body Of Secrets: How America’s Nsa And Britan’s Gchq Eavesdrop On The World, By James Bamford
As we observe the fortieth anniversary of the Six-Day War of June 1967, there are few things to celebrate. One notable exception is the full exposure of the actual events of the Israeli aggression which hitherto have been carefully guarded secrets. In particular the frenzied attempts by the Israelis to sink the USS Liberty and…
Read MoreServants Of Wealth: The Right’s Assault On Economic Justice, By John Ehrenberg
My students often question me about the current state of American politics and society. Being located in a plainly proletarian city, they aren’t so much asking for an empirical account of the conditions they are already observing for themselves. Instead , they want me to explain how the greatest country in the world’ could find…
Read MoreCosmopolitanism: Ethics In A World Of Strangers, By Kwame Anthony Appiah
Foreign policy not so long ago seemed to move in maddeningly elitist ways far outside the public sphere of ordinary citizens, but it’s now almost downright de rigueur for many Americans, stung by blowback’ effects, to be interested in its arcane details. As a result of technological innovations ranging from a 24-hour news cycle to…
Read MoreAfterlife Of An Atheist
Shakespeare’s contemporary John Webster wrote that death hath ten thousand several ways for men to make their exits. But he was silent about the number of ways they re-enter. John Rodden has filled the gap with Scenes from an Afterlife, his account of the near ten thousand several ways that Orwell has been revived to…
Read MoreReading Legitimation Crisis In Iran, By Danny Postel
In Persian there is a piece of proverbial wisdom that praises a statement, a report, an analysis, or even a book, for being brief-and thereby beneficial. To a person who is not getting to the point, Iranians politely plead to be “brief and beneficial.” Danny Postel’s book, Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran, does a good…
Read MoreIsrael’s Palestine: It’s Apartheid And Not Peace
The Messenger and His Message Jimmy Carter’s book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, is an insider memoir with a political purpose. It tells the story of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process from 1973 to the present intertwined with Carter’s own experiences and reminiscences as the president who convened Camp David I, brought about the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty,…
Read MoreThreatening Anthropology: Mccarthyism And The Fbi’s Surveillance Of Activist Anthropologists, By David H. Price
Don’t dare be a liberal – never mind, a leftist. That was the message of McCarthyism and its ideological cousins through the Seventies in anthropology. If you tried it, the FBI and CIA would see to it that you paid dearly. This is the major finding of David Price’s Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s…
Read MoreThe Mystique Of Genetic Correctness
The advent of Dolly the cloned sheep in 1996 – RIP in 2003 – left many an onlooker feeling both celebrative and uneasy.1 With irrepressibly manic ingenuity the biological sciences are dissolving our supposedly fuddy-duddy moral boundaries so that many scientists find themselves in debates they really would rather avoid as to the wisdom of playing cavalierly…
Read MoreBlitzkrieg in Gaza
On June 27, 2006 Israel sent troops, tanks and aircraft into the Gaza Strip. This invasion has been described to the world as a “rescue operation” to free one soldier who had been taken prisoner by Palestinian resistance forces. Almost certainly Corporal Gilad Shalit’s capture on June 25th served as a pretext for an operation…
Read MoreCourt Jesters In Absurdistan: Review Of Rebel With A Cause: Liberal Satire In Post War America, By Stephen Kercher
For me, fresh out of a Chicago suburb, it served as the diving board to Bohemian oblivion: a Second City show seen in 1961. To encounter people in post Fifties America, on a stage, skewering Ike, Liberal-indifference, and cookie-cutter Suburban conformity was bliss in that airless Cold War Utopia. Second City director Paul Sills was…
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