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It has been a sorry though predictable exercise. When he lived up (or down) to expectations of atrocious conduct befitting the proud bigot that he is, Israel’s Minister for National Security had to be seen as aberrant, the man who strayed, if only slightly. The conduct in question involved Itamar Ben-Gvir’s posting of footage on social media mocking the fate of activists of the Global Sumud Flotilla who had made a failed humanitarian effort to break the blockade of Gaza. The activists, seized in international waters by Israeli forces off the coast of Cyprus, had been blindfolded, their …

There are ages when humanity loses the ability to imagine a world beyond its own comfort, and ours is one of them. We have mastered technology, expanded economies, and built systems of astonishing complexity, yet we struggle to imagine justice, compassion, or shared dignity. Our crisis is not a lack of intelligence. It is a collapse of moral imagination.

We can design machines that learn, but we cannot imagine societies that care. We can map the human genome, but we cannot envision a world where every child eats. We can send rockets to Mars, but we cannot imagine peace on earth. …

The author of the op-ed “Sexual violence is used as a tool of war” assumes Nicholas Kristof’s claim that Hamas raped women on their October 7, 2023 breakout from Gaza actually happened: a claim which investigators including Max Blumenthal found long ago to be not only without foundation but used intentionally to generate genocidal Jewish vengeance.  While I assume that the author Denise Handlarski was well-meaning in accusing both Israel and the Palestinians, as many feel compelled to do, equating them mischaracterizes both the power differential and the extent of criminality.

People would be outraged if the crimes of Jews in …

There’s something broken in America. Our economy is broken. Our politics are broken. Even our relationships with each other feel broken. That’s because the most powerful people in the world want it that way. The biggest divide in this country is not left vs. right. It’s top vs. bottom. Billionaires want us looking left and right at each other instead of looking up at them. The people at the top work so hard to keep us angry and divided because our unity is a threat to their wealth and power. So their cable news networks and their social media algorithms tear …

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Governance in Honduras shifted sharply to the extreme right within months of National Party’s Nasry Asfura taking office on January 27, succeeding the Libre party’s progressive Xiomara Castro. In November 30 elections, the National Party was trailing a poor third before Trump threatened to end all aid to Honduras unless Asfura won. Even then, Asfura had only a wafer-thin plurality, which might well have disappeared had the electoral council not broken its mandate by halting the count before all the votes had been tallied.

Compounding this blatant interference, Trump announced just two …

What does Trump Restaurant serve up to its hungry customers?

Giant Mine is a Monster that has loomed over many generations of Yellowknives Dene. It is constantly changing shape… but its legacy is always destruction and death.

– Johanne Black, director of Treaty, Rights, & Governance, Yellowknives Dene First Nation

What is colonially designated as the Northwest Territories (NWT) of Canada, but is referred to as Denedeh (the land of the Dene)¹It should be noted that the Inuit comprise a substantial Indigenous population in the more northern regions. About 10% of NWT’s population. by the Dene, is enormous — about 1,127,712 square kilometres (435,412 sq mi); yet, its is sparsely populated …

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  It should be noted that the Inuit comprise a substantial Indigenous population in the more northern regions. About 10% of NWT’s population.

On December 22, 1984, Bernie Goetz—“the subway vigilante”—shot four unarmed Black teenagers on a New York City subway after one had asked Goetz for five dollars. Pulling an unregistered Smith & Wesson revolver from his waistband, Goetz fired five shots with expert precision at the teens, gravely wounding them all. Each suffered extensive hospitalizations and surgeries, and one, Darrell Cabey, was left paralyzed and mentally impaired for life. The media spectacle that ensued worked to garner public sympathy for the shooter, helping to confirm biases and normalize racial prejudice as a …

Dinh Q. Lê (Vietnam), Untitled, 2004.

On the anniversary of Vietnam’s liberation, the International People’s Assembly and Tricontinental Asia launched the ‘Hands Off Asia!’ campaign, calling for the removal of US and NATO bases from Asia, an end to aggressive military pacts, and respect for Asian sovereignty. On this occasion, we organised a webinar with Asian women intellectuals and organisers – from Hanoi, Isfahan, Naha, Taipei, Manila, and Seoul – who came bearing different chapters of the same …

Sammy Attoh comes with a linguistic oddity that is both perplexing and interesting. Attoh opens with a poem followed by a discussion, annotation, and elaboration of what Sammy Attoh has written. It is not a typical first person perspective, as the I, me, my are not used. It is written as if the writer, Sammy Attoh, is writing as a detached, separate entity, as if as an out-of-body perspective.

Is the government on the side of parents?

“Fly like an eagle, and run without tiring,” the chieftain said to Becky years ago.

Back then he was the youngest head of the tribe anyone could remember. An upright, energetic man he also became an ordained minister, bought the general store, then the two-pump gas station on Oak Street.

A few things have changed since then, most have not.
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Becky comes in the store to buy rice, bread flour, and milk. The shelves are almost picked clean. There are only two dented cans of tomato paste and a row of imported dreamcatchers hanging beside the register in plastic sleeves.

The neon …

As scholars, teachers, administrators, and students in rhetoric and composition, an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that studies the power of language, discourse, and communication, we head to Portland, Oregon, this week to attend the biennial conference of the national professional academic association, the Rhetoric Society of America. I am thinking of the Rhetoric Society of America’s abysmal failures on Palestine.

Aghast and breaking at the unimaginable horrors being inflicted by Israel and the US on the occupied peoples and lands of Palestine that we were witnessing, over a hundred scholars, teachers, administrators, and students in the field of rhetoric …

They are a disagreeable bunch, with disagreeable ideas to match. The querulous brats behind the drive for technological servility and plugged-in stupidity were always going to scrap over which dystopian vision they most prefer. Elon Musk thought he was onto something, hounding OpenAI and its current CEO, Sam Altman, for supposedly betraying one of those visions. In his $150 billion legal action, Musk alleged that Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman deceived him into investing in the company in its initial stages when salad green altruism was modish, and humanity mattered. The litigation was a prong in a broader …

Caitlin Taylor believes that a sustainable food system needs “legible” infrastructure, which is why she proposes—not entirely in jest—building slaughterhouses next to farmers’ markets.

Architects and engineers usually strive to make infrastructure invisible—so functional and reliable that we forget about the countless systems that undergird modern life. We turn on a faucet without wondering where the water comes from and flush toilets without thinking about waste-treatment plants.

Most people probably prefer invisible infrastructure for beef production and poultry processing, but Taylor believes that the legibility of infrastructure—making systems visible and understandable—is crucial for justice and sustainability in food production.

“There is a …