Fifty Years of Living with America’s Unexploded Bombs

Laos Was Collateral Damage in the U.S.’ Secret War. The Wounds Are Visible in the Land and in Generations Still Waiting on Justice

A horrific image haunts me: my father amputating a little girl’s leg to stop her from bleeding to death. The girl attended the same village school as my siblings and me. She was about my age, around 5. As blood flowed from her tiny body, my father’s snow-white lab coat turned bright crimson. The girl’s cries and her mother’s painful screams terrified me. I stood frozen, unable to turn away until my mother swept me to the safety of our home.

My father worked on countless victims of unexploded ordnance, or …

Why Do We Want Ceasefires?

A 7th-Century Roman-Arab Conflict Shows the Power of Enduring Peace Treaties Over Temporary Truces

Why do we want a ceasefire?

This question is in the news as a result of the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict, but the question is actually ancient. It reminds me, a historian …

Will SoCal’s Barbie Doll or NorCal’s Bobby Oppenheimer Destroy the World First?

Forget the Big Box Office War of Summer 2023. Barbenheimer Is a Tale of Two Competing California Apocalypses

Which region is the greater threat to humanity: Northern California or Southern California?

That’s the most urgent question raised by 2023’s great cinematic contest between Oppenheimer and Barbie.

Sure, these are entertaining …

Can Fiction Teach Us How to Live in a World Full of Suffering?

Reading and Writing Can Help Us Understand the Difficult Past and Imagine Better Futures

Any work of fiction is an investigation of aftermath, borne of the world that has already occurred. Fiction offers readers as well as writers the possibility to explore past transgressions …

The Journalist Who Photographed the Burning Monk

The Man Behind an Iconic Vietnam War Image Captured ‘the Ugliest Events of Our Time’

While President John F. Kennedy was talking by phone with his brother, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, on the morning of Tuesday, June 12, 1963, he suddenly exclaimed: “Jesus …

What Sharing the Burden of War Could Look Like | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

What Sharing the Burden of War Could Look Like

A Military Chaplain on How Those Who Fought and Those Who Sent Them Can Hold This Weight Together

This spring, I walked into an old Quaker meeting house on Pocumtuck homeland, now Massachusetts. I had been invited by Ojibwa Elders Strong Oak and Grandmother Nancy to participate in …