Rebecca Gordon
Rebecca Gordon is the author of the new book American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes and previously, Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States. She teaches in the philosophy department at the University of San Francisco. She is a member of the War Times/Tiempo de Guerras collective. You can contact her through the Mainstreaming Torture website.
Articles by this author
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Views Thursday, March 07, 2019 From Mowing the Grass to Cutting the Flesh I’ll never forget the first time I saw my own menstrual period start. I was seated on the floor in a circle of women, legs bent in front of me, soles facing each other, a mirror resting on my feet. The flashlight directed at the mirror illuminated my vagina, which was held open by a plastic... Read more |
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Views Monday, February 11, 2019 The Uses of a Well-Regulated Militia by an Unregulated President A young friend is seriously considering joining her state’s National Guard. She’s a world-class athlete, but also a working-class woman from a rural background competing in a rich person’s sport. Between seasons, she works for a local farm and auctioneer to put together the money for equipment and... Read more |
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Views Thursday, January 10, 2019 Confronting "Alternative Facts": A Twenty-First-Century Incredibility Chasm In one of the Bible stories about the death of Jesus, local collaborators with the Roman Empire haul him before Pontius Pilate, the imperial governor of Palestine. Although the situation is dire for one of them, the two engage in a bit of epistemological banter. Jesus allows that his work is about... Read more |
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Views Thursday, December 06, 2018 Life at Trump Speed: On Mental Whiplash and Forgotten Outrages I took my first hit of speed in 1970 during my freshman year in college. That little white pill -- Dexedrine -- was a revelation. It made whatever I was doing absolutely fascinating. Amphetamine sharpened my focus and banished all appetites except a hunger for knowledge. I spent that entire night... Read more |
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Views Thursday, October 11, 2018 All Eyes on Nevada: A Chance to Swing the Senate It’s what campaigners say every November, I know, but this year’s election really is as important as it gets. Will U.S. voters choose to halt the progress of Donald J. Trump’s slow-motion coup? Or will the tide just continue rolling over us? So much depends on what happens in Nevada -- a state that... Read more |
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Views Monday, September 10, 2018 Holding the Line on Torture Sometimes the good guys do win. That’s what happened on August 8th in San Francisco when the Council of Representatives of the American Psychological Association (APA) decided to extend a policy keeping its members out of the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The APA’s decision is... Read more |
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Views Thursday, July 19, 2018 Making Sense of U.S. Moves in the Middle East My father and I always had a tacit agreement: “We will never speak of That Part of the World.” He’d grown up in an Orthodox Jewish family in Norfolk, Virginia. His own father, a refugee from early-twentieth-century pogroms in what is now Ukraine, had been the president of his local Zionist... Read more |
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Views Monday, June 25, 2018 Nicaragua at the Barricades... And a Crossroads On April 19th, university students in Nicaragua’s capital, Managua, exploded onto the streets. Their initial demand? A more effective government response to wildfires burning out of control in the country’s most precious repository of biodiversity. Soon, a social wildfire took hold in Managua and... Read more |
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Views Thursday, May 24, 2018 Trump Drones On They are like the camel’s nose, lifting a corner of the tent. Don’t be fooled, though. It won’t take long until the whole animal is sitting inside, sipping your tea and eating your sweets. In countries around the world -- in the Middle East , Asia Minor , Central Asia , Africa , even the... Read more |
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Views Sunday, April 29, 2018 Can Bean Counters Save the World From Trump? They call people like us “bean counters”—the soulless ones beavering away in some windowless accounting department, the living calculators who don’t care about desperation or aspirations, who just want you to turn in your expense report on time and explain those perfectly legitimate charges on the... Read more |