One day when I was drawing a young girl, I suddenly noticed that the only thing that was alive was her gaze. The rest of her head meant no more to me than the skull of a dead man. One does want to sculpt a living person, but what makes him alive is without doubt…
When Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney used the idiom “Obamacare” at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), it was another sign of how the Republican Party practices intellectual laziness and dishonesty. It also signified a lengthy “rewording” campaign to manipulate Americans. Starting in 1990, Republican leaders issued a list…
January 15, 2004, and TomDispatch had only been in existence for a year when Chalmers Johnson, author of the prophetic book Blowback (published in 2000 and a bestseller after the 9/11 attacks), did a piece for this site entitled “America’s Empire of Bases.” He wrote then: “Due to government secrecy, our citizens are…
Car Waiting There is a big difference between “shock and awe” and disruptive innovation. Shock and awe is a superficial and short-lived gut response. True disruptive innovation changes the course of the way we see, think or do things. The core of all art is expression of the deep self. If, in following your deepest…
Everyone loves smut, says Patty Marks of Ellora’s Cave, who turned kinky fiction into millions before E.L. James It might seem that women reading super-smutty romance novels is a new phenomenon, thanks to deafening buzz around the series whose name cannot be spoken. (Fine, “Fifty Shades of Grey.” There! I said it.) But to Patty…
Speaking to a packed audience Wednesday morning in Geneva, CERN director general Rolf Heuer confirmed that two separate teams working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are more than 99 percent certain they’ve discovered the Higgs boson, aka the God particle—or at the least a brand-new particle exactly where they expected the Higgs to…
On July 1st Hong Kong celebrated the 15th anniversary of its return to Chinese rule. What is familiar in this celebration in comparison with the last one five years ago is the stately discourse from China’s central government as well as the words of gratitude from Hong Kong officials. What is different are the…
Perhaps some Assange-bashers are envious. Despite his legal problems, he’s the host, director, and producer of a program that makes us care about his predicament—even if you’re not a full-fledged fan. We’re finally getting a chance to know this guy, through the questions he asks and the way he asks them Julian Assange prepares…
It was a huge surprise that Julian Assange suddenly checked into the Embassy of República del Ecuador in London. The twitter reaction from leading Swedish media personalities, in the midst of a Football match, was predictably myopic – and as nationalistic as Football. The picture that came into their minds was that of an…
What would you do for free food? More than 200 naked shoppers flocked to a German supermarket in hopes of snagging some free groceries last week. The store, located in the city of Süderlügum, offered to treat the first hundred shoppers to up to $276 worth of items if they came wearing only their birthday…