To many of those with an interest in Africa and the tragic consequences of the colonization of that continent by Europeans, the work of Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, who would have been 90 years old today, has been a revelation. In my own case, I was not exposed to, nor did I seek out, the…
I suspect that for a lot of prosperous liberals, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing. For them, there’s an alternative to political victory: a utopia of scolding. Who needs to win elections when you can personally reestablish the rightful social order every day on Twitter and Facebook? When you can scold, and scold, and…
Happy Birthday to anti-imperialist Mark Twain – born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835.
As Twain told the New York Herald in October of 1900, after becoming more familiar with the Treaty of Paris and witnessing the U.S. war on the Philippines: “so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.”
According to NPR’s Petra Mayer, “the crowd went wild” over science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s impassioned defense of the genre’s place in American fiction at the National Book Awards on November 19. Le Guin went further, providing an otherwise sedate crowd with a stirring indictment of capitalism, suggesting we will need visionary writers…
Forty years ago this month, Kentucky writer and farmer Wendell Berry traveled to Washington to address the “Agriculture for a Small Planet” symposium in Spokane. Invited to the West Coast to give voice to a “Labor Intensive Micro-Systems Viewpoint” – a phrase he promptly took issue with – Berry’s presentation eventually became the foundation of…
