Tom Engelhardt

Tom Engelhardt created and runs the Tomdispatch.com website, a project of The Nation Institute of which he is a Fellow. He is also consulting editor for Metropolitan Books and the co-founder of its American Empire Project series. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), which has just been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq and of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing, about a world he inhabited for thirty years. Each spring he is a Teaching Fellow at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

Tomdispatch.com began in November 2001 as Tom Engelhardt’s unnamed e-list of commentary and collected articles from the world press. In December 2002, it gained its name, became a project of The Nation Institute, and went online as “a regular antidote to the mainstream media.” It now posts Tom Engelhardt’s regular commentaries and the original work of authors ranging from Rebecca Solnit and Mike Davis to Chalmers Johnson, Michael Klare, and Elizabeth de la Vega. Nick Turse (who also writes for the site) is its part-time associate editor and research director.

Tomdispatch is intended to introduce readers to voices and perspectives from elsewhere (even when the elsewhere is here). Its mission is to connect some of the global dots regularly left unconnected by the mainstream media and to offer a clearer sense of how this imperial globe of ours actually works. It also has regular interviews with thinkers and doers Engelhardt admires. These are now collected in Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters (Nation Books, October, 2006)

Currently

  • Reading in an Age of Depression

    December 18, 2008

    An editor ponders the publishing industry meltdown--and the precarious future of books.

  • Hard Times Without Studs

    December 10, 2008 Subscribe

    His death is like the closing of an archive of what was best in America.

  • The Imperial Transition

    December 10, 2008

    Obama's transition is the earliest, biggest, fastest, best organized and most efficient on record. But has the media failed to see the larger architecture of this moment, and what it portends for the presidency to come?

  • Foreclosed: The George W. Bush Story

    November 3, 2008

    The property is worth a lot less than when he took ownership in 2000, and the world is far more dangerous place. Now it's up to the rest of us to clean up the mess.

  • My Great Depression

    October 14, 2008

    Far more than all the other bad things that have happened during the Bush years, our current financial crisis makes me feel that the American empire is in ruin.

  • Six Questions About Anthrax

    August 18, 2008

    And one answer: Bush's global 'war on terror' operates on a double standard.

  • The Wedding Crashers

    July 14, 2008

    In Bush's wars, the singer dies, the bride does not get a chance to run away, and the event might be relabeled my big, fat, collateral damage wedding.

  • No Blood For ...er, um...

    June 23, 2008

    More than five years after the invasion of Iraq--just in case you were still waiting--the oil giants finally hit the front page.

  • The Little Administration That Couldn't

    March 28, 2008

    At the hour of our latest and greatest crisis, don't expect anything of this bunch but the usual heck of a job.

  • Iraq: The View from Year Six

    March 19, 2008

    In March 2009, no matter who is president, Iraq will still be hell on Earth.

  • Potshots in Space

    February 20, 2008

    From the heaving deck of the USS Lake Erie, the Bush Administration takes shaky aim at a rogue satellite hurtling to Earh, carrying unknown secrets. The missile attack is purely humanitarian, they assure us.

  • From Guernica to Iraq

    February 7, 2008 Subscribe

    There's an escalating air war in Iraq; why don't American media consider it serious news?

  • Exit Poll

    February 5, 2008

    American voters, stuck in the world that Bush and Cheney have crafted, are sensing doom--and they want out.

  • CSI: Iraq

    January 18, 2008

    Despite the cosmetic acts of President Bush, his undertakers and enablers, America's Iraq is still a corpse.

  • The Bush Legacy: Journey to the Dark Side

    January 8, 2008

    We have not come to grips with how centrally the Bush Administration has planted torture, abuse, kidnapping, and illegal imprisonment at the heart of governmental practice, the news, and everyday life.

2007

  • As the World Burns

    November 17, 2007

    Uncomfortable questions nobody wants to raise about the worldwide drought.

  • Who Lost Pakistan?

    November 6, 2007

    How often can the Bush Administration be caught off guard by the consequences of its own actions? Endlessly, it seems.

  • We Count, They Don't

    October 4, 2007

    The Bush Administration once professed there were no body counts in its war on terror. But in the metrics-driven post-surge accounting in Iraq, it turns out it's been counting everything.

  • Order 17

    September 24, 2007

    A closer look at the US rule that gives military contractors like Blackwater a free pass to murder, terrorize and pillage their way through Iraq.

  • Iraq Progress: By the Numbers

    September 10, 2007

    As General David Petraeus makes his case for continuing the war, here's an accounting of the real costs.

  • What 'Progress' in Iraq Really Means

    August 13, 2007

    The cost of deploying a soldier, the number of bullets fired for each insurgent killed, the percentage of Iraqi babies born underweight. A portrait-by-numbers of the Iraq catastrophe.

  • Red Zone, Green Zone

    August 1, 2007

    Pundits speculate the US can win stability if not victory in Iraq, but beyond the philosophical Green Zone they inhabit, life becomes ever more desperate for Iraqi civilians.

  • Why the US Military Loves Ron Paul

    July 23, 2007

    The anti-war Texas Republican is pulling more campaign contributions from the military than John McCain. That says a lot about the mindset of the troops.

  • Iraq, By the Numbers

    July 2, 2007

    No need to wait until September to see if the surge is working. Just look at the numbers.

  • A Permanent Military Empire

    June 8, 2007

    To mainstream media, the Bush Administration's full-scale garrisoning of Planet Earth is simply not a news story. But in Iraq beyond, America's empire of permanent bases grows at an alarming pace.

  • Colossus of Baghdad

    May 29, 2007

    As conditions worsen inside Baghdad's embattled Green Zone, construction continues on a grandiose US Embassy complex that mirrors Bush Administration delusions of a reordered Middle East. Take a virtual tour.

  • Graduates, Close Your Eyes

    May 21, 2007

    A passionate critic of the Iraq War has this advice for the Class of 2007: Be afraid. And look within for answers to all the problems you have inherited.

  • The Price of a Life

    May 14, 2007

    Sure, the US government values the lives of innocents killed in combat. Just how much depends on whether they died in New York, Afghanistan or Iraq.

  • Thelma and Louise Imperialism

    February 14, 2007

    Are Bush and Cheney so wedded to their delusions that they might gun the car and head directly over the cliff in a confrontation with Iran?

2006

  • 9/11 in a Movie-Made World

    September 10, 2006

    What if the Twin Towers hadn't collapsed? Would the Bush Administration have so easily advanced its fear-inspired "war on terror" without the images that played on a culture's secret fears?

  • Can You Say 'Permanent Bases'?

    March 9, 2006 Subscribe

    Despite recent press visits, the building of bases in Iraq has not come under much scrutiny. If Congress and opposition Democrats continue to ignore the issue, there will be no withdrawal from Iraq.

2005

2000

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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