Our Concentration Camps: An Open Letter in the New York Review of Books

To the Editors: In Tornillo, Texas, in rows of pale yellow tents, some 1,600 children who were forcefully taken from their families sleep in lined-up bunks, boys separated from the girls. The children, who are between the ages of thirteen and seventeen, have limited access to legal services. They are not schooled. They are given…

“The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration, and Abuse” ed. Marjorie Cohn

“Experience, we are told, is a great teacher. If this is so, then my classroom was a clandestine prison and my teachers, experts in the commission of crimes against humanity.” (Sister Dianna Ortiz, from Preface) Thus begins this harrowing collection of essays on torture, incarceration, and the flouting of human rights by the world’s most…

“Call a lie a lie.” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on the responsibilities of writers

Congratulations to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on winning the PEN Pinter Prize, awarded to a writer who shows “the real truth of our lives and our societies.” The judges described her as “sophisticated beyond measure in her understanding of gender, race, and global inequality.” I haven’t read much of Adichie’s work, but I know she’s regarded…

“The Instinct for Cooperation: A Graphic Novel Conversation with Noam Chomsky & Jeffrey Wilson. Illustrated by Eliseu Gouveia”

How about this for a hybrid: take an 80-something professor, sit him down for a conversation, and turn it into a graphic novel. It really shouldn’t work, but it does. Noam Chomsky has long been the world’s foremost intellectual, an unrivaled authority on human rights and world affairs. I would say he’s forgotten more than…

The Other 9/11: Chile in the time of Pinochet

A few days ago, my 10-year-old son asked me why I’d scheduled an event on 9/11. “Bad timing!” he said. He knew about the Twin Towers. But he didn’t know about 9/11/73, a date of infamy in Latin America. 9/11/73 was the day General Augusto Pinochet launched a military coup that ousted democratically elected Chilean…

“The scars of history are on every writer.” Ngugi Wa Thiong’o in “The Nation”

The great Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong’o is known for at least four things: writing a series of superb novels such as The River Between and A Grain of Wheat while still in his twenties; writing the novel Devil on the Cross on toilet paper while imprisoned in Kenya’s Kamiti maximum-security prison; turning from writing…

“Illegal” by Eoin Colfer, Andrew Donkin, illustrated by Giovanni Rigano

“You, who are so-called illegal aliens, must know that no human being is illegal. That is a contradiction in terms. Human beings can be beautiful or more beautiful, they can be fat or skinny, they can be right or wrong, but illegal? How can a human being be illegal?” (Elie Wiesel, Nobel Laureate and Holocaust…

Nelson Mandela – happy centenary, Madiba!

Happy birthday, Madiba. He would have been 100 on July 18th, 2018. Mandela was the greatest man of our time. Courageous, unrelenting, humble, forgiving. I cannot state how much his example has meant to me and countless others. His story is well-known: his fight for racial justice, the Rivonia trial, his lost years (27 of…

“Human Flow”: a film by Ai Weiwei

For a film with ‘flow’ in its title, the only surprise in this superlative documentary is that the most powerful images are those of stillness. An old refugee woman sits incongruously on a bench in the middle of nowhere. A young man stares out at us, daring us to enter his life. The implacable sea,…

“Extracting Profit: Imperialism, Neoliberalism, and the New Scramble for Africa” by Lee Wengraf

Here’s a quote from the Berlin Conference of 1885, in which the European powers set out their goals for Africa: “… all the powers bind themselves to watch over the preservation of the native tribes, and to care for the improvement of the conditions of their moral and material well-being.” If an African read that…

PEN America announces Writing for Justice Fellowship

  PEN America has run a prison writing program for over forty years. The program provides mentors, free resources and an audience for the incarcerated. This program benefits the prisoners, who get a chance to reflect on their lives through the written word and to express themselves in new ways. But the program also benefits…

10 Martin Luther King Quotes for MLK Day

From the tradition that led to Barack Obama, Martin Luther King was among the most lyrical of leaders. He combined the tones of a preacher in the black southern tradition with the rhythms of a poet. Especially for MLK Day, here are some of his words.   1. “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is,…