Sightseeing buses are for those who deeply dread the places they’re visiting. You can’t really see a city or town from a motorized anything, so if you claim to have driven through Los Angeles, for example, you haven’t seen it. The speed and protection of a car prevents you from being anywhere except inside your car, with what’s outside rushing by so fast that each face, tree and building is rudely dismissed by the next, next and next. You can’t pause, come closer, examine, converse, sniff or step on something, so what’s the point of visiting Los Angeles like this, except to say that you’ve been there? Continue reading →
In Sartre’s “No Exit,” hell is depicted as a room with two women and a man, which is fair enough, for a threesome is never what you envisioned it would be, in the privacy of your own hell. Hell is also “other people,” “les autres,” for in the company of another, one’s vanity, smugness, extreme prejudices and fantasies, whether philosophical, political, charitable or pornographic, are rudely disrupted. Continue reading →
Of all the words uttered by a person, only a few remain unforgettable to any listener, for these can charm, haunt, humiliate, annoy or terrify even decades later. Continue reading →
Activist Jean Ziegler, “I am so radical, because I know the victims” Continue reading →
KABUL—The Afghan Peace Volunteers are a group of young people in Afghanistan who are committed to learning about and practicing Gandhi’s nonviolence. Many of them live in a house in Kabul. I had met this inspiring group when I visited Kabul in the spring of 2011 with an organization based in the USA called Voices for Creative Nonviolence. In mid-November, I had the opportunity to return to Kabul and spend a month living, working and playing with the group. Continue reading →
When you first visit a sub-Saharan country, in our case Tanzania, on a safari tour, you easily get the impression that this is paradise. Wild animals in a healthy environment who live together, most of them getting along wonderfully well. Obviously though, in spite of the superficial impression of peace, when you see a lioness with her two cubs tearing at the pieces of a recent kill, you realize that what governs the lives of these wild beasts is the law of the jungle. Continue reading →
An interview with Linh Dinh
Linh Dinh is the author of two books of stories, five of poems, and a novel, Love Like Hate. He’s tracking our deteriorating socialscape through his frequently updated photo blog, State of the Union. Continue reading →
KABUL, Afghanistan, Oct. 7, 2012—At 5:15 a.m., the main street outside the Afghan Peace Volunteer’s (APV) apartment is quiet, and the first weak rays of gray light filter down through dusty, polluted air. In the distance, the hulking brown mountains circling the Kabuli plain emerge ominously from darkness. Continue reading →
The power of music is one of the great unknowns in the human saga. For reasons we don’t quite understand (yet), its vibrations can lift us to great heights, drop us down into deep depression, liberate us, make us joyous, help us grieve, and so much more. Continue reading →
VALBONA, Albania—A week ago, it started snowing. Continue reading →
Say Athena, and you think archaeology, Europe, cultural heritage and more. Say ATHENA Project, the situation becomes more mysterious, but you quickly learn it is linked to culture, ancient theaters, communication and flow of cooperation and ideas between European and Arab countries across the Mediterranean. Continue reading →
Interview with Ingrid Mathieu, PhD, author of “Recovering Spirituality: Achieving Emotional Sobriety in Your Spiritual Practice”
Anonymous, 12-Step programs have helped millions recover from addictions. Yet it is also possible to use the spiritual underpinnings of the programs to avoid addiction-related problems instead of dealing with them, says researcher and psychotherapist Ingrid Mathieu in her new book. We explored these topics in an interview. Continue reading →
Halloween is associated with many strange creatures, but none more so than the vampire. To most people, the vampire is nothing more than a mythic monster popularized in movies, television, books and so on. Yet the vampire, an amalgamation of ancient lore woven through with sex, fear, danger and gore, is no mere Hollywood creation. Continue reading →
ROME—When decades ago I interviewed the legendary Ahmed Ben Bella, the man who ignited the Algerian War of Liberation against French colonial rule in 1954, was also chairman and animator of the FLN (Front de Liberation Nationale), and subsequently became the first post-colonial president of liberated and independent Algeria, 1962–1965, he repeatedly described himself as a revolutionary, not a theoretician, a man of action, not an intellectual, an internationalist, an Islamic progressive fundamentalist, an Arab Moslem and man of the Third World. Continue reading →
Chances are that if Vandana Shiva had been a mass killer, you’d all have heard of her by now because she’d have received the Nobel Peace Prize, an honour evidently reserved for that august category of people—think Henry Kissinger, Barack Obama. Being only a preserver of life, and not a warmonger and dispatcher of machines that incinerate children in the night, she is less likely to have come to your attention. It is always dull to work for life; to work for death attracts so much more attention and infinitely more sound-bites. Continue reading →
VALBONA, Albania, May 2011—It is a cool evening in late spring, in Valbona. Continue reading →
My dear friend and neighbor, Shelly, a septuagenarian like myself, and the wife of my good friend and neighbor Dave, died Friday, July 1. This occurred after her hopeless battle with Alzheimer’s disease which had slowly turned this beautiful woman into a ghostlike presence, blind, barely recognizing the sounds of our voices. Yet we still have nothing but placebos for this dreadful illness that eats away at the brain with tangles and plaque, slowly devouring the brain and its functions. Continue reading →
On US Interstates, we meet the US empire coming towards us. In this evocative video, we meet confederate ghosts and demons of consumer emptiness. We travel down the highway, propelled by engines of extinction, towards empire’s end, where we find ourselves bearing much grief yet are stranded amid ferocious beauty. Continue reading →
I’m in Atlanta, Georgia, at present, among the scent of pine trees and the reek of southern denial. The moribund economy has thwarted the city’s manic drive to silence its resentful ghosts by means of constant motion … Below the lilting southern accents here, one detects rage … Not simply the ubiquitous hate-speak on right-wing talk radio. But an animus bred by truth-deferred … that southern pride is a lie of the mind — a blown banner … foisted skyward to distract the minds of my fellow southerners from the ground level truths of a system rigged to enrich the privileged few and keep the many working for their benefit. (How do you think they filled the ranks of the Confederate Army to kill and die for the rights of rich men to own slaves.) Continue reading →
ROME—Rubygate it’s called. The final act of the Berlusconi saga. Over fifteen years of comedy for the outside world. A comedy played out against a background of non-government and misery for many Italians. Continue reading →
ROME—Does colonialism pay off for anyone? In the long run, definitely not. There is always a payback. The events today in North Africa reflect this story. The situation today is the living and the dying proof of the payback. An atrocious, insufferable payback. The English in Egypt, the French in Algeria, the Italians in Libya. But especially the occupied Arab peoples of Egypt, Algeria and Libya, have all paid and continue to pay the price of colonialism. Continue reading →
Samir Amin is a Franco-Egyptian economist, a member of the International Council of the World Social Forum and chairman of the World Forum for Alternatives. Samir Amin analyzes the political and economic crisis in Egypt. Continue reading →
I am sitting down to write this with a pressing internal sense of compulsion — there is something I want to make understood — but I begin writing with no clear program for how to communicate absolutely something so simple. Continue reading →
