Angels in a Changed America
Who is Walter Benjamin, and why is he haunting HBO?For those who didn't major in cultural studies, Benjamin was Europe's greatest criticmake that apprehenderof modernity. But he couldn't escape the...
View ArticleThe Dennis Kucinich Polka
I meet Democratic presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich on December 18 at Cornell College outside of Iowa City. The peace walkers are there. One of them, an emaciated kid with a beard, gives a short...
View ArticleA Crime of Compassion
Five feminists committed a crime in broad daylight Sunday afternoon before some 100 cheering accomplices at Rockefeller Plaza, and they blamed the Food and Drug Administration for making them do it....
View ArticleThe Crimes of Courtney Love
Sure it was a publicity stunt. When Courtney Love gave David Letterman a peek, and later did the same and more for some guy outside Wendy's, she certainly had the sales of her latest album in mind....
View ArticleStuff Happens
There Donald Rumsfeld was, fielding unfriendly fire on Tuesday over the military's torture of Iraqi prisoners. This time, his usual pose of barely concealed contempt seemed more like scarcely...
View ArticleEcstasy Relieved from Agony
Today is different: You're speaking to a psychiatrist -- not in a sterile, fluorescent-lit hospital, but in a residential office on a peaceful, tree-lined street. You suffer from post-traumatic stress...
View ArticleWatching Blood and Gore
The moment Donald Rumsfeld had been warning about -- the worse-to-come moment -- arrived last Wednesday (May 12), when new images of atrocities at Abu Ghraib prison were released. The Pentagon brought...
View ArticleIn Line for the Rapture
It was an e-mail we weren't meant to see. Not for our eyes were the notes that showed White House staffers taking two-hour meetings with Christian fundamentalists, where they passed off bogus social...
View ArticlePatriot Act Besieged
The objective of the Patriot Act [is to make] the population visible and the Justice Department invisible. The Act inverts the constitutional requirement that people's lives be private and the work of...
View ArticleRockefeller Reform
Cheri O'Donoghue usually spends her days inside an office in Manhattan, working as an editor at a glossy magazine. But last Wednesday, the mother of two took the day off from work and at 7:30 a.m....
View ArticleHoaxing the Supreme Court
"The person who is locked up, doesn't he have a right to bring before some tribunal . . . his own words?" --- Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, during oral arguments in the Jose Padilla and...
View ArticlePutting the President in His Place
We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens. – Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, writing for the Supreme...
View ArticleThe Ghost Prisoners
More than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. Many others have met a different fate. Put it this way, they're no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and...
View ArticleThe Church of Bush
Here are some things that Christopher Nunneley, a conservative activist in Birmingham, Alabama, believes. That some time in June, apparently unnoticed by the world media, George Bush negotiated an end...
View ArticleSick Without A Safety Net
If they're not outright poor as a class, young adults in this country are at least very, very broke. The average collegian graduates with more than $20,000 in debt, headed for a job market where real...
View ArticlePatriot Act Speed Bumps
Bush's re-election ensures that he and John Ashcroft's designated successor, Alberto Gonzales, will press Congress hard to retain the Patriot Act in its entirety, and enact a Patriot Act II that will...
View ArticleMedical Marijuana Keeps on Rolling
When Assemblyman Richard Gottfried proposed a bill legalizing marijuana for sick people in 1997, his odds of success seemed slim. State Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, a Republican, vowed to...
View ArticleA Cloud Over the Constitution
The problem with Gonzales is that he has been deeply involved in developing some of the most sweeping claims of near-dictatorial presidential power in our nation's history. These claims put President...
View ArticleSeven Years on the Sidewalk
One afternoon last week, Randy Credico sat in a friend's apartment in the West Village and sifted through a plastic bin packed with photos. There were hundreds of them – each representing another...
View ArticleWhat Did Rumsfeld Do?
"U.S. officials who take part in torture, authorize it, or even close their eyes to it, can be prosecuted by courts anywhere in the world [under international law]."Kenneth Roth, executive director,...
View ArticleThe Eve of Destruction
You might wonder – were you someone unfamiliar with or in denial about the ways of the Karl Rove Mafia – how George W. Bush could blunder into nominating someone as attorney general so obviously...
View ArticleWhen There Was No Choice
At 77, Dr. Harry S. Jonas can still pinpoint the exact moment when he understood the importance of making abortion legal. The year was 1952 and he was an eager, young obstetrics-gynecology intern in...
View ArticleLiving in Oblivion
While George W. Bush is being inaugurated in Washington, D.C., this Thursday, the annual Sundance Film Festival will kick off in Park City, Utah. The two events may seem unrelated, but as we saw in...
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The Last Executioner
For 51 years, a family in upstate New York has closely guarded one of the most explosive, and unusual, secrets any family could have: Its late patriarch, Dow B. Hover, was New York State's...
View ArticleCGI Joe
Waging war isn't about fun and games. Or is it? A visit to one of the world's biggest conventions for military training technology reveals that today's armed forces are taking cues from video games,...
View ArticleThug Radio
The crime scene out front didn't cool Hot 97's "blazing hip hop and R&B" last week – or mute the station's intense coverage of the on-air beef between 50 Cent and the Game that ended in bloodshed...
View ArticleAnother Times Culpa
The New York Times--where I spent the first 26 rewarding years of my journalism life--bent one of its ethical rules recently. It was not a lapse of major proportions, but in the aftermath of the...
View ArticleIs This Your America
Jumah Dossari has been imprisoned at Guantánamo for nearly four years without charges or access to his family, in nearly complete isolation. On October 15, he tried to hang himself in his cell,...
View ArticleAn Army of None
"They're talking 'bout us lying, but look at this," complained Army Staff Sergeant Blanco (he declined to give his first name), holding up one of the flyers a group of anarchists was distributing...
View ArticleRolling Down the Gates in Little Pakistan
At 12:16 p.m. Monday, the rumbling began. Across a stretch of Coney Island Avenue known as Little Pakistan, store owners began pulling down their shop gates to show their solidarity with striking...
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