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SHARE Thursday, February 19, 2026 Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, Working for a Nuclear-Free Future (Especially Now!)
"I'm not scared, you're scared!" is the repeated line in a children's story we recently read to the kids at the Unitarian Universalist version of Sunday school I attend with my children. In that story, a scared bear and a brave rabbit, who (naturally!) are best friends, go on a hike together[...]
SHARE Tuesday, February 17, 2026 Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Apprentices (Us!)
Once upon a time, if you had described Donald Trump's America to me (the second time around), I would have thought you mad as Alice in Wonderland's proverbial hatter -- or, if you were a fiction writer, I would have considered your plot so ludicrous that, after reading a few pages, I would undoubtedly have tossed your book in the trash[...]
SHARE Thursday, February 12, 2026 Tomgram: John Feffer, Trump Goes Rogue as a Globocop
A mere 15 years ago, during an epoch that now seems as distant as the Paleozoic era, an American president attempted to use military power to prevent a dictator from slaughtering his own citizens. Barack Obama billed the action in Libya as a humanitarian intervention, citing the new U.N. doctrine of "responsibility to protect" (R2P)[...]
SHARE Wednesday, February 11, 2026 Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Homeward Bound? (Not in Donald Trump's America)
Today, during my slog through the Substack messages, newspaper headline notices, and podcast reminders that hit my inbox every morning, two stories drew my attention. Both had to do with the fact that human beings have always moved around this planet, beginning long before there were any countries or maps to display the borders where one nation ends and another begins[...]
SHARE Monday, February 9, 2026 Tomgram: Eric Ross, Living on Borrowed Time
On February 5th, with the expiration of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, the only bilateral arms control treaty left between the United States and Russia, we are guaranteed to find ourselves ever closer to the edge of a perilous precipice. The renewed arms race that seems likely to take place could plunge the world, once and for all, into the nuclear abyss[...]
SHARE Thursday, February 5, 2026 Tomgram: William Astore, America's Teflon Pentagon
What constitutes national security and how is it best achieved? Does massive military spending really make a country more secure, and what perils to democracy and liberty are posed by vast military establishments? Questions like those are rarely addressed in honest ways these days in America. Instead, the Trump administration favors preparations for war and more war[...]
SHARE Tuesday, February 3, 2026 Tomgram: Liz Theoharis and Sam Theoharis, Why We Need Young Organizers Now
Here's a small suggestion from the two authors of this piece (us): don't be young in Donald Trump's America if you can help it. Being young in America right now means you'll have to contend with stalling job markets, rampant inflation, deep political and economic instability, and impending climate disaster. If you point these things out, you're labeled a dangerous (and misguided) radical[...]
SHARE Monday, February 2, 2026 Tomgram: Juan Cole, Shooting Protesters from Minneapolis to Tehran
The pro-democracy protesters in Iran deserved so much better. They deserved the support of a democratic United States that could sincerely urge the rule of law and habeas corpus (allowing people to legally challenge their detentions) be respected, not to speak of freedom of speech, the press, and assembly in accordance with the constitution[...]
SHARE Thursday, January 29, 2026 Tomgram: Engelhardt, Obituary for an Autocrat
Having reached a certain age and long been fascinated by obituaries, I sometimes think about both Donald Trump's and my own. At 79, he's just slightly less than two years younger than me, though of course I wasn't the 45th president of the United States or the 47th one either[...]
SHARE Tuesday, January 27, 2026 Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, Waste Not, Want Not (on a Trumpian Planet)
I learned one of my most valuable lessons about U.S. power in my first year as a Brown University doctoral student.It was in anthropology professor Catherine Lutz's seminar on empire and social movements. I'd sum up what I remember something like this: Americans consume one hell of a lot -- cars, clothes, food, toys, expensive private colleges (ahem"), and that's just to start[...]
SHARE Monday, January 26, 2026 Tomgram: Patrick Strickland, Searching for Hope in an Age of War and Hard Borders
After a year of gutting the United States government, deploying armed jackboots to American cities, and bombing at least seven countries, the Trump administration kicked off 2026 by invading Venezuela and kidnapping its president, Nicola's Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores[...]
SHARE Thursday, January 22, 2026 Tomgram: William D. Hartung, Trump's Doubling Down on Imperialism in Latin America Is a Formula for Decline
The Trump administration's exercise in armed regime change in Venezuela should have come as no surprise. The U.S. naval buildup in the Caribbean and the attacks on defenseless boats off the Venezuelan coast -- based on unproven allegations that they contained drug traffickers -- had been underway for more than three months[...]
SHARE Tuesday, January 20, 2026 Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, The Real Donald, Duck!
Writers often try to gild their tawdry times or dignify their flawed leaders with lofty literary analogies -- notably, America as the New Jerusalem; Lincoln as Moses leading his people through the wilderness of the Civil War; the Kennedy White House as an incarnation of King Arthur's "Camelot"; or Lyndon Johnson living his last years as a latter-day King Lear[...]
SHARE Thursday, January 15, 2026 Tomgram: Clarence Lusane, Is Vance Next?
Donald Trump may, of course, be the Republican candidate for president in 2028, the U.S. Constitution notwithstanding. Although it is clearly written in the 22nd Amendment that "no person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice," it may well be a majority vote of the Supreme Court that determines whether that applies to Trump[...]
SHARE Tuesday, January 13, 2026 Tomgram: Stan Cox, Climate Meltdown, Mass Extinction, Resource Wars"and Maybe a Way Out?
Let me start by putting things bluntly: Don't bother to tell Donald Trump, but with his distinct help, we're doing nothing less than cooking ourselves. Thanks to the continued use of fossil fuels in a staggering fashion and the growth of greenhouse gas emissions, almost half of the world's population now suffers through 30 additional days of extreme heat annually. Heatwaves roll in thicker and faster every year[...]
SHARE Monday, January 12, 2026 Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Has Trump Left Me with Nothin'?
"Tom, I got nothin'." That's all I wanted to say to Tom Engelhardt, the kindly and incisive editor of TomDispatch.com. He'd called to check in and see what I was planning for my next piece. I wanted to tell him, "I'm staring at starvation and genocide, the destruction of American democracy and the rule of law, along with the ongoing incineration of our planet[...]
SHARE Thursday, January 8, 2026 Tomgram: Michael Klare, Edging Closer to Armageddon?
For most of us, Friday, February 6, 2026, is likely to feel no different than Thursday, February 5th. It will be a work or school day for many of us. It might involve shopping for the weekend or an evening get-together with friends, or any of the other mundane tasks of life. But from a world-historical perspective, that day will represent a dramatic turning point, with far-reaching and potentially catastrophic consequences[...
SHARE Tuesday, January 6, 2026 Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, The "Quiet, Piggy" Presidency
"Quiet, Piggy." The president was intent on silencing Catherine Lucey. The Bloomberg reporter had provoked him with a question about the release of the Epstein files. His insult caught the public's attention. But Trump's tongue-lashing lexicon against women has a long history[...]
SHARE Monday, January 5, 2026 Tomgram: Engelhardt, On Going Down, Down, Down
As 2026 begins, what a strange planet we find ourselves on. The two great empires of my youth, the Soviet Union (now Russia) and my own country, are clearly experiencing some version of imperial decline, even if Vladimir Putin is acting otherwise in Ukraine (as is Donald Trump in his own strange fashion in the Caribbean Sea and Venezuela)[...]
SHARE Tuesday, December 23, 2025 Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, The Future According to Trump
For writers, the future has long been a tricky terrain. While the past can prove unsettling and the present uncomfortable, the future seems to free the mind from reality's restraints and let the imagination soar. Yet it has also proven full of political pitfalls[...]