When Dylann Roof pulled a gun at a Bible study in Charleston, South Carolina, his shots rang through history to the roots of the ideology of white supremacy, which justified genocide of indigenous peoples and the enslavement of black people from Africa. We deny this at our own risk. Roof attacked the Emanuel African […]

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  Switzerland is a great country, if you like mountains, lakes, secret bank accounts, especially at 2,100 meters altitude, with a view of Monte Rosa and the Matterhorn, which I once climbed as a college kid—ages ago in 1948. As it happens, as I write, it is the 150th anniversary in Zermatt of the day […]

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  Seventy years ago today, on July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb was detonated at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in New Mexico–known from that day in 1945 as the “Trinity Site.” Trinity was the code name for the first detonation, chosen by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the technical director of the Manhattan Project […]

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  Suddenly, with a single flap of the Angel of History’s wings, America has experienced a shuddering change: the American swastika has finally become toxic—a liberation that last month seemed so impossible that we’d forgotten to bother to think about it. One doesn’t waste energy worrying over the fact that America controls over 700 military […]

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  I am a Southerner by both birth and heritage. I come from a long line of poor white cotton farmers on both sides of my family. Three of my four great-grandfathers fought in the Confederate Army. The fourth had been told by his parents that he could join the army when he turned 13; […]

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