Tom Engelhardt
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His sixth and latest book, just published, is A Nation Unmade by War (Dispatch Books).Previous books include: Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World (with an introduction by Glenn Greenwald). Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 (co-authored with Nick Turse), The United States of Fear, The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's, The End of Victory Culture: a History of the Cold War and Beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.
Articles by this author
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Views Thursday, March 07, 2019 Feminism, Radical Literature, and Little Old Me Sometimes your past returns in the strangest of ways, as happened to me when today’s article from TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon first crossed my doorstep. As you’ll see, its subject would not be one on which this almost 75-year-old guy would consider himself to have the slightest expertise:... Read more |
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Views Monday, March 04, 2019 A Swiftian Modest Proposal for the President Call me crazy, if you want, but I think I see how to do it! We have two intractable issues, one intractable president, and an intractable world, but what if it weren’t so? What if those two intractable problems could be swept off the table by a single gesture from that same intractable man? As a... Read more |
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Views Monday, February 25, 2019 Striking for the Right to a Future She began cutting school on Fridays and simply sitting on the steps of the Swedish parliament. Her name was Greta Thunberg. She was 15 years old, with a mind of her own and a sign demanding a school strike against climate change. Her parents wanted her to go back to school, but Friday after Friday... Read more |
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Views Friday, February 15, 2019 An Obituary for the Republic What dreamers they were! They imagined a kind of global power that would leave even Rome at its Augustan height in the shade. They imagined a world made for one, a planet that could be swallowed by a single great power. No, not just great, but beyond anything ever seen before -- one that would... Read more |
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Views Thursday, January 24, 2019 Amnesia and the 'Bleeding Wound': Afghanistan and the Implosion of America As I approach 75, I’m having a commonplace experience for my age. I live with a brain that’s beginning to dump previously secure memories—names, the contents of books I read long ago (or all too recently), events, whatever. If you’re of a certain age yourself, you know the story. Recently, however... Read more |
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Views Friday, January 18, 2019 Hiroshima and Me: A Duck-and-Cover Story Let me tell you a little story about Hiroshima and me: As a young man, I was anything but atypical in having the Bomb (we capitalized it then) on my brain, and not just while I was ducking under my school desk as sirens howled their nuclear attack warnings outside. Like many people my age, I... Read more |
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Views Monday, January 07, 2019 Is Donald Trump an Asteroid? Sixty-six million years ago, so the scientists tell us , an asteroid slammed into this planet. Landing on what’s now Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, it gouged out a crater 150 kilometers wide and put so much soot and sulfur into the atmosphere that it created what was essentially a prolonged “ nuclear... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, December 18, 2018 In Praise of a Military Budget That Ensures Our Destruction Imagine, for a moment, a country that no longer rebuilds or reinforces its sagging infrastructure but just can’t stop pouring money into its military. Oh wait, you don’t have to imagine that at all! You just have to look at the United States. This fall, for instance, the president who swore he was... Read more |
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Views Thursday, December 13, 2018 A Bad World for Migrants (and I Don’t Even Mean Human Ones) It’s not been a good era for migrants—and no, I’m not talking about those “caravans” of desperate human beings from Central America heading for the U.S. (and the wrath of Donald J. Trump). I’m thinking about birds—shorebirds, in fact, which are surely the greatest migrants on the planet. The... Read more |
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Views Monday, December 10, 2018 In the Shadow of Donald Trump: A World Unnoticed Breaking News! -- as NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt often puts it when beginning his evening broadcast. Here, in summary, is my view of the news that’s breaking in the United States on just about any day of the week: Trump. Trump. Trump. Trump. Trump. Or rather (in the president’s style):... Read more |