The ascent of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States in 2016 did not take place in a vacuum, nor did his grab for unprecedented executive power that far transcend democratic norms. Starting back in the Soviet era, the KGB and its successors methodically studied various components of the American body politic […]

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Milton Glaser—the peerless graphic designer, painter, and visionary for humanity—was a dear and generous friend and ally to me and to Peter, Paul & Mary. His passing, in my life, is that of the loss of a surrogate father, though he was only nine years my senior and I’m sure he never knew that this […]

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Judgment. Responsibility. Guilt. Crimes. Justice. Throughout The Memory of Justice, Marcel Ophuls’s sprawling 1976 jeremiad on the Nuremberg trials, these are the terms that spring into action in nearly every scene. I have watched this film dozens of times; I have devoted countless hours to taking notes and rewinding key moments and sleeping and dreaming […]

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On June 28, 2007, Don Siegelman made his final appearance in U.S. District Court Judge Mark Everett Fuller’s courtroom. The former secretary of state, attorney general, lieutenant governor, and governor of Alabama was in leg-irons, handcuffs, and a jailhouse jumpsuit, as directed by the judge. Appointed to the bench by George W. Bush (then resigning […]

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Universally acclaimed poet Carolyn Forché is famous for “poetry of witness,” a term she first coined in her groundbreaking anthology, Against Forgetting. Her honors include a Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation Award for crafting her poetry as a “means to attain understanding, reconciliation, and peace within communities […]

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