In 2009 Raj Patel wrote words that have reappeared to me as if out of a thick fog: “The future will be shaped by our will to imagine a different kind of market society, and new ways of valuing the world without resorting to the tic of free markets.” I…

MIDDLEBURY — On Sunday, April 9, at 10:28 p.m, Middlebury College received a hoax call of an active shooter in the Davis Family Library. The Davis Family Library, once a symbol of knowledge and hope, has now become a trigger — a stark reality. Let me reiterate: a library, a…

Could The Talibanization of America actually be possible? That is, a total shut down and repression of American life? What are the signs? Elected officials wearing AK-47 lapel pins; aggressive, vociferous attacks leveled at President Biden while delivering The State of the Union Address; the removal of books from the…

“In my dreams, the war is silent,” writes Bushra Al-Maqtari in What Have You Left Behind? “No missiles, nor air raids, no murder, no famine, no fear, no hatred. But when I wake, the war is still raging, just as it has been the past four years.” From Al-Maqtari, and…

A close reading of the US Embassy, in Islamabad, Pakistan, document, which was handed to a young woman, a high school student from Afghanistan with two US acceptances and scholarships to elite private schools, reveals the following language, after the menacing, “A Failure to Establish Ties”: One main requirement to…

In 2005, Middlebury College admitted our first Afghan student, a candidate from the Initiative to Educate Afghan Women. The following year another woman followed; eventually, there were 12 Afghan students whose different paths lead to the college (three were young men). I was fortunate to have taught all of them. …

For 12 weeks, September to December, 2022, a total of 30 hrs, I taught in-person every Monday and Wednesday, 8:40 am to 9:55 am, in Middlebury College’s Axinn Center for the Humanities, room 104. …

for my students, present and long inside the world of confusing animosity Only a fool would maintain that the concept holding the nation together, the United States of America, still holds true. From the Big Lie to the storming of the Capitol to the leaked Roe v. Wade Supreme Court…

On a mild autumn day in Rosario, the largest city in the central Argentine province of Santa Fe, on the west bank of the Paraná River, on May 14, 1928, Liberata Baroni, my great grandmother and midwife, eased into the world Ernesto Guevara, the future Che. Dr. Ernesto “Che” Guevara…