A Website of the Radical Imagination
I recently read two memoirs: Luis Buñuel’s Mi último suspiro and Reinaldo Arenas’ Antes que anochezca. Buñuel’s memoir ends with the word tumba and Arenas’ ends with the word noche: words that are like broken talismans or coins that have lost their value with the vertiginous inflation of illness and the regime change that is … Read more
I have been reading the first volume of Churchill’s history of World War II, The Gathering Storm. How can one not be impressed with his relentless, hawkish criticism of the appeasing Chamberlain and the weak-kneed continental powers that were disarming while German was arming in the 1930s? Is there a lesson for today? Republican critics … Read more
Putin’s seizure of Crimea produced no agreement on the nature of a prudent response, but it did prompt a remarkable number of historical analogies and putative lessons. On the interventionist side analogies to Hitler were initially pretty common—some of the first, predictably enough, were to Munich, followed by a few to the Anschluss. These kicked … Read more
The author is a physician and priest who has been working in Haiti for a generation, running hospitals and social programs in Port au Prince as well as a Nuestros Pequenos Hermanos orphanage on the outskirts of the capital. Fr. Frechette is the author of The God of Rough Places, the Lord of Burnt Men … Read more
What follows is Francisco Goldman’s introduction to Oscar Martinez’s The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail, which was published in the USA by Verso in 2013. First thanks Verso for allowing us to reprint Goldman’s tribute to Martinez’s audacious and skillful reporting on “the terrifying lives of Central American migrants.” … Read more
The greatest danger to Israel is not the putative Iranian nuclear bomb. The greatest danger is the stupidity of our leaders. This is not a uniquely Israeli phenomenon. A great many of the world’s leaders are plain stupid, and always have been. Enough to look at what happened in Europe in July 1914, when … Read more
Don’t play around the course he got the took the rook the crook the snook all were pasted upon him like a long vicious learning there is all of Africa all of night all the every trace of sweet hurt distilled like cobalt turned into night the distant moon a door to where no one … Read more