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2008
2007
2006
2005
2004
2003
Sasha Abramsky 2007
Sasha
Abramsky 2006
Graham Allison
John Anderson
Greg Anrig
William
Arkin
Anthony Arnove
Mary-Wynne Ashford
John Bainbridge, Jr.
Nicholson Baker
James Bamford
Benjamin Barber 9/07
Benjamin Barber 2007
Benjamin
Barber 2004
Charles Barber
Maude Barlow
Albert Bates
Moazzam Begg
Mark Benjamin
Steve Berkman
Alain de Botton
Max Blumenthal
Sidney Blumenthal
Eric Boehlert
Ellen Bravo
Daniel Brook
David Callahan
Karen Cerulo
Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Gordon Chang
Pratap Chatterjee
Jeff Chester
Aviva Chomsky
Jesus Christ
William R. Clark
Elliot D. Cohen
Penny Coleman
Francis Collins
Jonathan Cohn
Joe Conason
Robert Creamer
Nick Davies
John Dean
Larry Diamond
Tamara Draut
Lou Dubose
Stephen J. Ducat
Ronnie Dugger
Stephen Duncombe
Paul V. Dutton
Ronald Dworkin
Daniel Ellsberg
and Sibel Edmonds
David Engwicht
Barbara Ehrenreich
Christopher Ellinger
Stuart Ewen
Anne Farrow
Jay Feinman
Karen Finley
Robert Fisk
Laura Flanders
Joshua Frank
David Frankfurter
Scott Gac
George Galloway - 2007
George
Galloway - 2005
Joel Garreau
Joseph
Gerson
Michelle Goldberg
Jeffrey C. Goldfarb
Richard Goldstein - 11/6/07
Richard
Goldstein -9/25/07
Greg Grandin
Glenn
Greenwald
Andrew Gumbel
Nicholas Guyatt
Jennifer Harbury
Thom
Hartmann
Steve Hendricks
Seymour
Hersh
Theresa Hitchens
Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Arianna Huffington
Edward Humes
Robert Ivker
Susan Jacoby
Derrick Jensen
Chalmers Johnson
Haynes Johnson
Terry
Jones
Fred Kaplan
Jackson Katz
Robert Blair Kaiser
Garrison Keillor
Maxine Hong Kingston
Michael T. Klare
Joe Klein
Elizabeth Kolbert
Andrew Koppelman
Felicia Kornbluh
Paul Krassner
Mark Kurlansky
Robert Kuttner
Elizabeth Laird
Jim Lardner
Anne Lamott
John Lamb Lash
Barry Lando
Bruce Lawrence
Marnia Lazreg
Jeremy Leggett
Greg LeRoy
Peggy Levitt
James Loewen
Bjorn Lomborg
Nancy MacLean
R. Jay Magill, Jr.
John Markoff
Matt Mason
Nicholas Maxwell
Walter Russell Mead
Sara Miles
Jennifer Miller
Mark Crispin Miller
George Monbiot
Douglas Mulhall
Peter Navarro
Victor Navasky
Andrew Newberg
Geoffrey Nunberg
Spencer Overton
Caroline Paul
Michael Parenti
Robert Parry
George Pendle
John Perkins
Kevin Phillips
Peter Phillips
William Rivers Pitt
Sarah Posner
Clyde Prestowitz
Nomi Prins
Tim Pritchard
Robert B. Reich
Scott Ritter
Bárbara
Robles
David Rose
Douglas
Rushkoff
Eva Rutland
John Sayles
Harold Schechter
Anthony Shadid
Michael Shermer
Jonathan Simon
David Sirota
Norman Solomon
Norm Stamper
Ralph Steadman
Leonard Steinhorn
Charles Stone
Helen Thomas
Craig Unger
David A. Vise
Jim Wallis
Harvey Weinstein
Mark Weisbrot
Ian Williams
Joseph Wilson
Mark Winne
Dr.
Sidney Wolfe
Lawrence Wright
Ronald
Wright
Michele
Wucker
Dave
Zirin
May
13, 2008
An interview with Nicholson
Baker author of Human
Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization.
Baker delivers a deeply moving indictment of the treasured myths that have romanticized much of the 1930s and '40s. Incorporating meticulous research and well-documented sources — including newspaper and magazine articles, radio speeches, memoirs, and diaries — the book juxtaposes hundreds of interrelated moments of decision, brutality, suffering, and mercy.
"'Burning a village properly takes a long time,' wrote a British commander in Iraq in 1920. Baker traces a direct line from there to WWII, when Flying Fortresses and incendiary bombs made it possible to burn a city in almost no time at all. Central to Baker's narrative — a chronological juxtaposition of discrete moments from 1892 to December 31, 1941 — are accounts from contemporary reports of Britain's terror campaign of repeatedly bombing German cities even before the London blitz. The cynical warmongering of Churchill and FDR; Churchill's hate-filled reference to "yellow Japanese lice" force one to reconsider means and ends even in a 'good' war and to view the word 'terror' in a very discomfiting context.
Praised by critics and readers alike for his exquisitely observant eye and deft, inimitable prose, Baker has assembled a narrative within Human Smoke that unfolds gracefully, tragically, and persuasively. This is an unforgettable book that makes a profound impact on our perceptions of historical events and mourns the unthinkable loss humanity has borne at its own hand.
Baker has published three works of nonfiction, including Double Fold, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001.
Listen
to the Baker interview here
May
6, 2008
An interview with Glenn
Greenwald author of Great
American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics.
Long since Americans were wooed by images of Ronald Reagan astride a horse, complete with cowboy hat and rugged good looks, the Republican Party has used a John Wayne mythology to build up its candidates and win elections. Their marketing scheme of evoking brave, courageous, heroic warriors has been so persuasive and strikes such a patriotic nerve, that many citizens have voted based on this manipulative imagery even when they’ve flat out disagreed with the GOP’s positions on key issues.
Glenn Greenwald puts this bogus GOP mythology under microscopic critique and successfully argues that none of these men is, in fact, a brave, strong moral warrior — far from it. Rather, most have dodged military duty, have strings of broken marriages and affairs, and live decadent, elitist lives, which they so ruthlessly condemn Democrats for doing. Such false archetypes — that GOP leaders are exclusively fit to command the military, represent traditional family values, and are fiscally restrained and responsible because they’re just regular folk like us — are so firmly entrenched in our culture as to allow the GOP to sit back and let their time-tested marketing ploy spin itself silly while avoiding debate on real issues. When they actually do voice opinions, it’s nothing more than a smear campaign of the supposed weakness and elitism of the Democrats.
To prevent this tired marketing scheme from succeeding again, Greenwald takes off the gloves and knocks down the hoaxes and myths, exposing the tactics the right-wing machine uses to drown out both reality and consideration of real issues. But he also calls on Democrats to shake off the defensive posture (“We love America too,” “We support the troops too,” “We also believe in God”) and start attacking the Republican candidates for the hypocrites they, in truth, are.
Greenwald is a former constitutional law attorney and now a contributing writer at Salon. His political reporting and analysis have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the American Conservative, and numerous congressional reports.
Listen
to the Greenwald interview here
April
22, 2008
An interview with Susan
Jacoby author of The
Age of American Unreason.
Jacoby paints a disturbing portrait of a mutant strain of public ignorance, anti-rationalism, and anti-intellectualism that has developed over the past four decades and now threatens the future of American democracy. Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, she dissects a culture at odds with America's heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern knowledge and science. Jacoby offers an unsparing indictment of the ways in which dumbness has been defined downward throughout American society-on the political right and the left. America's endemic anti-intellectual tendencies have been exacerbated by a new species of semiconscious anti-rationalism, feeding on and fed by a popular culture of video images and unremitting noise that leaves no room for contemplation or logic.
The book surveys an anti-rational landscape extending from reality TV and "infantainment" videos for babies to a pseudo-intellectual universe of "junk thought." This vast kingdom of junk thought reaches from semiliterate blogs of all political persuasions to institutions of so-called higher education that offer courses in "fat studies" and horror films but do not require students to obtain a thorough grounding in American and world history, science, and literature. Throughout our culture, disdain for logic and evidence is fostered by the infotainment media from television to the Web; aggressive anti-rational religious fundamentalism; poor public education; the intense politicization of intellectuals themselves; and-above all-a lazy and credulous public increasingly unwilling or unable to distinguish between fact and opinion.
Finally, Jacoby argues that anti-rational government is not the product of a Machiavellian plot by "Washington" but is the inevitable result of "an overarching crisis of memory and knowledge" that has left many ordinary citizens and their elected representatives without the intellectual tools needed for sound public decision-making. The real question is not why politicians have lied to the public but why the public was so receptive and so passive when it heard the lies. At this crucial political juncture, The Age of American Unreason challenges Americans to face the painful truth about what our descent into intellectual laziness and our flight from reason have cost us as individuals and as a nation.
Jacoby is the author of eight books. She is also program director of the Center for Inquiry-New York City, a rationalist think tank with offices in Lower Manhattan.
Listen
to the Jacoby interview here
April
15, 2008
An interview with Maude
Barlow author of Blue
Covenant: The Global Water
Crisis
and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water.
"Life
requires access to clean water; to deny the right to water is to deny
the right to life."
—
from the introduction to Blue Covenant
In their international bestseller Blue Gold, Maude Barlow and co-author Tony Clarke exposed how a handful of corporations are gaining ownership and control of the earth's dwindling water supply, depriving millions of people around the world of access to this most basic of resources and accelerating the onset of a global water crisis.
Blue Covenant, the sequel to Blue Gold, describes a powerful response to this trend: the emergence of an international, grassroots-led movement to have water declared a basic human right, something that can't be bought or sold for profit.
World-renowned activist Maude Barlow is at the center of this movement, which is gaining popular and political support across the globe, encompassing protests in India against U.S. bottling giant Coca-Cola; in Bolivia against the water privatization scheme of European water conglomerate Suez; against the use of water meters in South Africa; and over groundwater mining in Barrington, New Hampshire, and dozens of other communities in North America.
Barlow traces the history of these international battles, documents the life-and-death stakes involved in the fight for the right to water, and lays out the actions that we as global citizens must take to secure a water — just world — a "blue covenant"—for all.
Barlow is the National Chairperson of The Council of Canadians, Canada’s largest public advocacy organization, and the co-founder of the Blue Planet Project, working internationally for the right to water. She serves on the boards of the International Forum on Globalization and Food and Water Watch, as well as being a Councillor with the Hamburg-based World Future Council.
Listen
to the Barlow interview here
April
8, 2008
An interview with Nick
Davies author of Flat
Earth News: An Award-winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda
in the Global Media.
"Finally I was forced to admit that I work in a corrupted profession." When award-winning journalist Nick Davies decided to break Fleet Street's unwritten rule by investigating his own colleagues, he found that the business of reporting the truth had been slowly subverted by the mass production of ignorance.
Working with a network of off-the-record sources, Davies uncovered the story of the prestigious Sunday newspaper which allowed the CIA and MI6 to plant fiction in its columns; the newsroom which routinely rejects stories about black people; the respected paper that hired a professional fraudster to set up a front company to entrap senior political figures; the newspapers which support law and order while paying cash bribes to bent detectives. Davies names names and exposes the national stories which turn out to be pseudo events manufactured by the PR industry, and the global news stories which prove to be fiction generated by a new machinery of international propaganda. He shows the impact of this on a world where consumers believe a mass of stories which, in truth, are as false as the idea that the Earth is flat - from the millennium bug to the WMD in Iraq - tainting government policy, perverting popular belief. He presents a new model for understanding news. With the help of researchers from Cardiff University, who ran a ground-breaking analysis of our daily news, Davies found most reporters, most of the time, are not allowed to dig up stories or check their facts - a profession corrupted at the core.
Davies has been named Journalist of the Year, Reporter of the Year and Feature Writer of the Year for his investigations into crime, drugs, poverty and other social issues. He has been a journalist since 1976 and is currently a freelance, working regularly as special correspondent for The Guardian.
Listen
to the Davies interview here
March
25, 2008
An interview with Marnia
Lazreg author of Torture
and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad.
Lazreg looks at the intimate relationship between torture and colonial domination through a close examination of the French army's coercive tactics during the Algerian war from 1954 to 1962. By tracing the psychological, cultural, and political meanings of torture at the end of the French empire, she also sheds new light on the United States and its recourse to torture in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Torture
and the Twilight of Empire is nothing less than an anatomy
of torture — its methods, justifications, functions, and consequences.
Drawing extensively from archives, confessions by former torturers,
interviews with former soldiers, and war diaries, as well as writings
by Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and others, Lazreg argues that occupying
nations justify their systematic use of torture as a regrettable but
necessary means of saving Western civilization from those who challenge
their rule. She shows how torture was central to guerre révolutionnaire,
a French theory of modern warfare that called for total war against
the subject population and which informed a pacification strategy founded
on brutal psychological techniques borrowed from totalitarian movements.
Lazreg seeks to understand torture's impact on the Algerian population--especially
women--and also on the French troops who became their torturers. She
explores the roles Christianity and Islam played in rationalizing these
acts, and the ways in which torture became not only routine but even
acceptable.
Lazreg is professor of sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of
the City University of New York. Her books include The
Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question.
Listen
to the Lazreg interview here
March
18, 2008
An interview with Fred
Kaplan author of Daydream
Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power.
America's power is in decline, its foreign policy adrift, its allies alienated, its soldiers trapped in a war that even generals regard as unwinnable. What has happened these past eight years is well-known. Why it happened continues to puzzle. Slate columnist Fred Kaplan combines in-depth reporting and analysis to explain just how George W. Bush and his aides got so far off track — and why much of the nation followed.
For eight years, Kaplan reminds us, the White House — and many of the nation's podiums and opinion pages — rang out with appealing but deluded claims: that we live in a time like no other and that, therefore, the lessons of history no longer apply; that new technology has transformed warfare; that the world's peoples will be set free, if only America topples their dictators; and that those who dispute such promises do so for partisan reasons. They thought they were visionaries, but they only had visions. And they believed in their daydreams.
Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column in Slate. The author of the classic book The Wizards of Armageddon, he has also written for the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the Atlantic Monthly, and other publications. He worked as a foreign policy aide on Capitol Hill, and spent decades as a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter in Washington and Moscow.
Listen
to the Kaplan interview here
March
11, 2008
An interview with Nicholas
Maxwell author of From
Knowledge to Wisdom: A Revolution for Science and the Humanities.
From Knowledge to Wisdom argues that there is an urgent need, for both intellectual and humanitarian reasons, to bring about a revolution in science and the humanities. The outcome would be a kind of academic inquiry rationally devoted to helping humanity learn how to create a better world. The basic intellectual aim of inquiry would be to seek and promote wisdom — wisdom being the capacity to realize what is of value in life for oneself and others, thus including knowledge and technological know-how, but much else besides.
According to Maxwell, "Natural science has been extraordinarily successful in increasing knowledge. This has been of great benefit to humanity. But new knowledge and technological know-how increase our power to act which, without wisdom, may cause human suffering and death as well as human benefit. All our modern global problems have arisen in this way: global warming, the lethal character of modern war and terrorism, vast inequalities of wealth and power round the globe, rapid increase in population, rapid extinction of other species, even the aids epidemic (aids being spread by modern travel). All these have been made possible by modern science dissociated from the rational pursuit of wisdom. If we are to avoid in this century the horrors of the last one — wars, death camps, dictatorships, poverty, environmental damage — we urgently need to learn how to acquire more wisdom, which in turn means that our institutions of learning become devoted to that end.
For nearly 30 years Maxwell taught the Philosophy of Science at the University College London, where he is now Emeritus Reader in Philosophy of Science and Honorary Senior Research Fellow. He is also the author of What's Wrong With Science?, The Comprehensibility of the Universe, and The Human World in the Physical Universe.
Listen
to the Nicholas Maxwell interview here
March
4, 2008
An interview with Charles
Barber, author of Comfortably
Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation.
Public perceptions of mental health issues have changed dramatically over the last fifteen years, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the rampant overmedication of ordinary Americans. In 2006, 227 million antidepressant prescriptions were dispensed in the United States, more than any other class of medication; in that same year, the United States accounted for 66 percent of the global antidepressant market. Barber provides a much-needed context for this disturbing phenomenon.
Barber explores the ways in which pharmaceutical companies first create the need for a drug and then rush to fill it, and he reveals that the increasing pressure Americans are under to medicate themselves (direct-to-consumer advertising, fewer nondrug therapeutic options, the promise of the quick fix, the blurring of distinction between mental illness and everyday problems). Most importantly, he convincingly argues that without an industry to promote them, non-pharmaceutical approaches that could have the potential to help millions are tragically overlooked by a nation that sees drugs as an instant cure for all emotional difficulties.
Barber was educated at Harvard and Columbia and worked for ten years in New York City shelters for the homeless mentally ill. The title essay in his first book, Songs from the Black Chair, won a 2006 Pushcart Prize. His work has appeared in The New York Times and Scientific American Mind, among other publications. He is a senior administrator at The Connection, an innovative social services agency, and a lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine.
Listen
to the Charles Barber interview here.
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