Tom Engelhardt launched Tomdispatch in November 2001 as an e-mail publication offering commentary and collected articles from the world press. In December 2002, it gained its name, became a project of The Nation Institute, and went online as "a regular antidote to the mainstream media." The site now features Tom Engelhardt's regular commentaries and the original work of authors ranging from Rebecca Solnit, Bill McKibben, and Mike Davis to Chalmers Johnson, Michael Klare, Adam Hochschild, Robert Lipsyte, and Elizabeth de la Vega. Nick Turse, who also writes for the site, is associate editor and research director.
Tomdispatch is intended to introduce readers to voices and perspectives from elsewhere (even when the elsewhere is here). Its mission is to connect some of the global dots regularly left unconnected by the mainstream media and to offer a clearer sense of how this imperial globe of ours actually works.
Selected Comments about Tomdispatch
Jonathan Schell: "At a time when the mainstream media leave out half of what the public needs to know, while at the same time purveying oceans of official nonsense, the public needs an alternative source of news. Tom Engelhardt's Tomdispatch has been that for me. With unerring touch, he finds the stories I need to read, prefacing them each day with introductions that in themselves form a witty, hugely enjoyable, brilliant running commentary on the times. He is my mainstream."
Juan Cole: "Tom Engelhardt is a national treasure and always worth reading. Whenever I think that Russell Jacoby might have been right about the passing of the 'last intellectuals,' I think of Tom and conclude 'not yet.'" See the full article.
James Wolcott: "Tom Engelhardt [is] a writer of titanic energy and commitment."
Jim Lobe, Inter Press Service at his Lobelog blog: "Tom Engelhardt [is] the finest and hardest working essayist and editor of the post-9/11 era, who has kept a steady eye on Washington's 'baser' intentions since even before the 2003 invasion."
Steve Wasserman, editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review: "The I.F. Stone of the Internet."
Tony Karon, Time Magazine senior editor and creator of the Rootless Cosmopolitan blog: "Indispensable." See the full article.
Mike Tronnes, Editor, Cursor.org: "'Tom Engelhardt' is one brand that I just can't resist."
In 1964, a book entitled The Invisible Government shocked Americans with its revelations of a growing world of intelligence agencies playing fast and loose around the planet, a secret government lodged inside the one they knew that even the president didn't fully control. Almost half a century later, everything about that "invisible government" has grown vastly larger, more disturbing, and far more visible.
In her comic, scathing essay "Men Explain Things to Me," Rebecca Solnit took on what often goes wrong in conversations between men and women. She wrote about men who wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume women don’t, about why this arises, and how this aspect of the gender wars works, airing some of her own hilariously awful encounters.
The first history of drone warfare, written as it happened.
From the opening missile salvo in the skies over Afghanistan in 2001 to a secret strike in the Philippines early this year, or a future in which drones dogfight off the coast of Africa, Terminator Planet takes you to the front lines of combat, Washington war rooms, and beyond.
