In the nineteen-twenties, United States officials began preparing for the possibility of war in the Pacific, and the consequences this would have for the territory of Hawaii. About a third of Hawaii’s population were people of Japanese descent, a community that had first arrived in the late eighteen-hundreds to work in the sugarcane and pineapple … Read more
In October, 2018, on the night of a high-school homecoming dance in Southlake, Texas, a group of white students gathered at a friend’s house for an after-party. At some point, about eight of them piled together on a bed and, with a phone, filmed themselves chanting the N-word. The blurry, seesawing video went viral, and, … Read more
The narrator of Eliza Barry Callahan’s “The Hearing Test” is an artist in her late twenties named Eliza who lives in New York City. She wakes up one morning in August with a buzz in her ear that’s accompanied by the sound of “perpetually rolling thunder.” “It’s like God adjusting his piano stool but never … Read more
Decisions, decisions, decisions … our lives are filled with them. Some are small, like what to make for dinner or which television show to watch tonight. Even small decisions like these can be difficult to make, but they are not likely to impact your life over the long term. Others, however, can actually have life-changing … Read more
David Solway is something of a modern-day Renaissance man. On the back of his book Crossing the Jordan, he describes himself as an essayist, songwriter, and poet, but then goes on to refer to over 30 books that he has published in areas ranging from poetry, travel, and education theory to translation and politics, … Read more
Ari Harow found himself at the very heart of the Israeli political scene over a critical period in its history. In My Brother’s Keeper: Netanyahu, Obama, & The Year of Terror & Conflict That Changed the Middle East Forever, he gives his readers a full, frank, and detailed account of what he experienced. Born … Read more
Toward the end of 2002, with the United Nations scheduled to vote on a resolution authorizing a US-led attack on Iraq, president George W. Bush asked the CIA to assemble evidence that Saddam Hussein had ties to terrorism and possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Following a high-level presentation, Bush asked, “Is this the … Read more
Pnina Lahav’s book The Only Woman in the Room: Golda Meir and Her Path to Power tells Golda’s story through “the lens of gender.” When Israel’s Declaration of Independence was signed, only two of the 37 signatories were women – Rachel Kagan and Golda Meir. This is symbolic of the profound difficulty that women … Read more
Most of us aren’t quite sure how we’re supposed to feel about the dramatic improvement of machine capabilities—the class of tools and techniques we’ve collectively labelled, in shorthand, artificial intelligence. Some people can barely contain their excitement. Others are, to put it mildly, alarmed. What proponents of either extreme have in common is the conviction … Read more
