Cold War Illusions: Losing Friends
Just before the November 2016 elections, I was invited to share lunch at a place called Packer’s Corner, a tiny hamlet in southeastern Vermont. I was instantly intrigued. If “faded glory” fairly describes the place now, Packer’s Corner et ses…
An Interview With Stephen Kinzer, Part 2
The award-winning foreign correspondent and author of The True Flagspeaks about the state of US foreign policy and the media. Stephen Kinzer’s The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of the American Empire, published earlier this year, drew me…
An Interview With Stephen Kinzer
The award-winning foreign correspondent and author of The True Flag speaks on the 120-year history of American intervention in the world. When I started reading The True Flag, Stephen Kinzer’s latest book, I got only a few pages in before thinking, “I’ve read him…
A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year’s DNC Hack
Former NSA experts say it wasn’t a hack at all, but a leak—an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system. It is now a year since the Democratic National Committee’s mail system was compromised—a year since events in…
Journal Entry #24
Honorable actions. NORFOLK, CONN., 12 JULY—When I am made aware of people and the things they do such as the following, there is always some humiliation in it. I will be brief. I ought to have posted this days ago…
The Unacknowledged Logic of North Korea’s Missile Tests
We may not like it, but nuclear weapons may be all that stands in the way of another US-conducted “regime change.” Given that North Korea flooded the airwaves and the press during our July 4 rituals—which grow more objectionably militarist…
Journal Entry #23
NORFOLK, CONN., June 26—We cannot read even our best correspondents and writers anymore should they dare to assume a perspective that deviates even minorly from the orthodoxy. In consequence, one gets into pointless discussions, maybe tipping toward argument, with perfectly…
Journal Entry #22
VAGLIAGLI, NEAR SIENA, June 10—By the grace and generosity of someone very dear, I finish a couple of weeks in Italy today, most of its spent in a stone farmhouse on a vineyard in this little commune between Siena and Florence….
On Writers, the Media, and the Corruptions of Power
Joel Whitney, whose book Finks is about the CIA’s subversion of US culture, talks about the scars left by the Cold War. In Part 1 of my exchange with Joel Whitney, conducted shortly after OR Books published Finks: How the CIA Tricked the…
How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers
Joel Whitney talks about his book Finks, which exposes the agency’s corruption of American culture during the Cold War. “The past is a foreign country,” L.P. Hartley famously wrote as he opened The Go–Between. There is a pretty tristesse in…
Recent Comments