Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace is widely considered to be the best war novel ever written. Spatially, in its more than 1,800 pages it offers a vast panorama of Russia during the Napoleonic wars, both on the battlefield and on the home front. Temporally, Tolstoy shifts our attention back and forth between the big picture in time-lapse…
The leader of Hezbollah Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah challenged world intelligence services, notably the Israelis, who track him by the hour, during a three hour live broadcast interview with al-Mayadeen TV on Saturday. Nasrallah showed he has the technical ability to broadcast live for this length of time without fear of being located. Even more important,…
When I first learned about the Thirty Years War in a history class in college, I was both fascinated and amazed. How in the world could a war go on for 30 years? That just seemed incomprehensible to me. Not anymore. The U.S. war on Afghanistan has now been going on for 17 years. And…
Most folk outside the United States – and until this month, most Americans – won’t have heard of Michelle Alexander. She’s a civil rights lawyer and academic and has written a book called The New Jim Crow, and a few months ago The New York Times took her on as a regular columnist. Like millions of black – and…
Brazil is once again in the eye of a political hurricane, after President Jair Bolsonaro’s appearance at Davos and explosive revelations directly linking his clan to a criminal organization in Rio de Janeiro. With his administration barely a month old, Bolsonaro is already being seen as expendable to the elites that propelled him to power…
Ever since the Trump administration announced that it was no longer recognizing the legitimacy of the elected government of Venezuela I’ve been arguing with people on social media about this president’s brazen coup attempt in that country. The people arguing with me in favor of Trump’s interventionism are almost exclusively Trump supporters, with leftists and…
