Two days before the November elections, Elizabeth Moreno was driving to the Democratic Party headquarters in Manassas to pick up a list of addresses. She was planning to spend another day of canvassing to get out the vote for her candidate Hillary Clinton. Elizabeth had taken off a full week from her job at one… Continue reading Goodbye, Clinton!
On a wall in Boston, artist Mehdi Ghadyanloo is taking a quiet but historic step forward in U.S.-Iranian relations. His fanciful mural on an air intake structure in Boston’s Dewey Square represents a first. Ghadyanloo, who has completed more than a hundred surrealistic murals in downtown Tehran, is the first Iranian artist to do work… Continue reading The Art of Detente
Review of Robert Boynton, The Invitation-Only Zone (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 271 pages The abduction of Japanese citizens by the North Korean government is so fantastical a story that it seems to be the stuff of magical realism. It’s not surprising that so many Japanese refused for so long to believe… Continue reading The Invitation-Only Zone (Review)
How I Became a North Korean, Krys Lee (Viking, 2016), 246 pages It has become harder and harder these days to define what it means to be North Korean. During the heyday of Kim Il Sung, it was much easier to conflate individual North Koreans with their leader, their state, and the country’s prevailing… Continue reading How I Became a North Korean (Review)
Review of John Dower, The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War Two (Haymarket Books, 2017), 160 pages John Dower is one the most preeminent historians of World War II’s Pacific theater and the aftermath of the conflict in Asia. His book War Without Mercy (1986) described the racial component of the… Continue reading The Violent American Century (review)
Shortly after the November elections, a friend sent me a photo via Facebook. It was a sandwich board outside a bookstore in Massachusetts. It read: “Post-apocalyptic fiction has been moved to our current affairs section.” My friend added a note of her own: “Trump’s election should help with sales of your new book.” My gain,… Continue reading From Here to Dystopia
I didn’t vote in the pivotal American election of 2016. Thirty-five years ago, in that unseasonably warm month of November, I was in Antarctica’s Allan Hills taking ice core samples with a hand augur. The pictures I have from that time show my team drilling deep into the blue ice, but what we were actually… Continue reading How Donald Trump Changed Everything (2016-2020)
Shortly after taking office in 1969, President Richard Nixon devised his “madman theory.” It was the height of the Vietnam War, and Nixon believed that he could end the conflict. It just required a bit of unpredictability. “I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop… Continue reading Trump the Predictable
Donald Trump might seem like a uniquely American phenomenon. The shape-shifting billionaire huckster reinvented himself first as a TV personality and then as a maverick populist politician. He rode to power on patriotic slogans – Make America Great Again – and tailored his policy prescriptions to specific American constituencies like West Virginia coal miners and… Continue reading What Europe Can Teach Us About Trump
The election of Donald Trump is not only a surprise for many American citizens. It’s a shock to the international community. In fact, the shock might be so severe that it will be the death of the international community. What has happened in the United States is not unprecedented. But, as with most things to… Continue reading The Death of the International Community