What is a police state, and have we become one? These questions are asked with higher frequency since young Edward Snowden blew a loud whistle on our government spying on our phone calls and e-mail. But there has long been a more prosaic, everyday quality to American over-policing that doesn’t require high-tech surveillance. The […]

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  The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption, by journalist Kathryn Joyce, forces readers to question just whose needs are satisfied by adoption, driven as it is now by conservative Christians and a dangerous desire to do good. Joyce unpacks a multibillion-dollar transnational industry that is manufacturing orphans to satisfy the […]

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In the mid-1990s, at the height of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright visited Ramallah on the West Bank. U.S. military snipers were positioned on rooftops throughout the Palestinian town. Military helicopters buzzed overhead. As reporter based in Jerusalem at the time, I watched the scene unfold, and wondered what the price […]

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Throughout the long struggle for African-American freedom, tactical and philosophical nonviolence was rarely predominant. The quest for full civil and human rights was long, arduous, and multifaceted. And, whether in the 1870s or 1970s, black activists and citizens proved willing to take up arms to defend against white supremacy’s architects and agents. In his new […]

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George Orwell’s great dystopian novel, 1984, was published in 1949. The U.K. and the rest of Europe were recovering from years of devastating war. And in eastern Europe, the genocidal dictatorship of the Nazis was being replaced by the rival totalitarian rule of Stalinist USSR. 1984 has become a template of subsequent visions of modern […]

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