2016 Documentary Pertinent to Ongoing Russian Invasion

    Oleg’s Choice: A Personal Look at the Conflict in Ukraine (Java Films, 2016) is an insightful profile of two young Russian men, Oleg and Max, who volunteered to fight without pay in the Donbas after conflict erupted there in 2014. It is directed by Elena Volochine, France 24’s Moscow Bureau Chief (now no […]

Pharewell, Phil: Philip K. Dick (1928-1982)

      On this day, the fortieth anniversary of his untimely death, I come to praise Philip K. Dick, not to bury him. Despite PKD (as he is known to admirers near, far, and wide) only being 53 years old when he passed, on 2 March 1982, from a series of strokes that compounded […]

Cold War Finally Made Hot, and Not By Proxy

    It has been strange, this last week, to feel as if the fears of the early ‘80s had skipped over several decades and landed in our time to confront us. When I was a young soldier, in the Reagan-Bush era, we used to shoot at Soviet soldier-shaped outlines at the range. Back then, […]

Remembering Robert Lowell on His Birthday

    I fell in love with Lowell in college. I was seduced by the tautness of his language and the grandiosity of his worldview. “Skunk Hour,” with its painterly composition of a town in Maine, its deliberately pedestrian observations, its seemingly casual lineation, the incorporation of a song lyric (“Love, O careless love”) that […]

The Drumbeat of War

    “The drumbeat of war.” Media outlets all over the world latched onto that phrase, and for weeks, its driving, propulsive beat moved the news of Russia and Ukraine forward. CNN let us hear from Ukrainian business leaders “as drumbeat of war grows louder”; other outlets noted that “Drumbeat of war is already hurting […]

Nothing Works for Everybody

      One more article about how much we need sleep, and I will scream until dawn. We must have, they all insist, at least seven hours every night. Or we will lose our minds and die. There is, no doubt, some truth in this bossy advice. But I have struggled with insomnia since […]

The Snake Island 13

    The bravery and devotion to duty of the small State Border Guard Service garrison on Snake [Zmiinyi] Island, an outpost of Ukrainian territorial boundaries in the Black Sea, has been much on social media. When a Russian naval vessel, said to be the cruiser Moskva, demanded their surrender in the first day of […]

The Smurf Glass Incident

    For a time, back in the Reagan-Bush era, I was a teen employee in a Hardee’s in coal country. By incompetence I had failed upward, away from the fry station and off the backline, to work the front counter, and then that most American techno-capitalist space, the drive-thru window. I was like a […]

How Words Can Change a War

      We all know how propaganda works, how deliberately chosen words become cogs in our war machines, whipping up certain emotions on purpose. But we forget how subtly those word choices can play out, and sometimes we cooperate unwittingly. Israel “occupied” East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights after the 1967 war, for example, […]

Michael Harrington’s The Other America

      In 1962 Michael Harrington’s The Other America: Poverty in the United States was published. It was truly one of those remarkable books that fundamentally changed the nature of the debate. Like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring published the same year, it managed to draw attention to a significant but largely unrecognized threat to […]