Great films, like great literature, please and teach. Wild Horse Nine is a bold, hilarious and heartbreaking ride, but it is also a “downbeat Western” that is aware enough of itself to teach us what it means to play with this style.
Like Sam Shepard’s True West, which John Malkovich...
John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell play CIA agents plotting coup on socialist Chilean leader Salvador Allende in Wild Horse Nine
In Martin McDonagh’s sophisticated political comedy and spy thriller Wild Horse Nine, set during the summer of 1973, undercover CIA agents Lee Chesterfield (Sam Rockwell) and Chris Carlisle (John Malkovich)...
Bill Hamilton was a computer genius who translated articles in the North Vietnamese press for the National Security Agency (NSA) during the Vietnam War and, with his wife Nancy, developed computer software under contract with the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) to help law enforcement agencies collect money owed...
The magnitude, distinction and dramatic contradictions in the turnaround 2026 presidential election victory of Luíz Inácio Lula da Silva warrants this and other grass-root analysis. Claiming a historic fourth term as Brazil’s head of state, this time defeating the now-fugitive son of the coup-attempt, convicted and disgraced former president,...
Just a few weeks ago, following the first round of Brazil’s presidential election, the world seemed convinced that a victory for Flávio Bolsonaro was inevitable.
History appeared to support that assumption: No candidate had ever overturned the first-round result in a Brazilian presidential runoff. Right-wing forces had been advancing across...
Netflix has revived public interest in the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski (1942-2023), a one-time mathematics professor at UC Berkeley, who killed three people and injured 23 in a mail-bombing campaign from 1978 to 1995 targeting people he thought were destroying society and the environment through use of modern technology.
Kaczynski was...
Brian Randall Kahn. It is not a name you will typically see topping the social media trends, and I am certain he would have liked it that way. Throughout most of his career he stayed in the background within the fields of private equity, hedge funds, distressed companies and...
Introduction
In 2024 and 2025 The New Times, an online publication edited by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), published more than 30 articles on the origins of the kingdom of Rwanda, the events that led to the overthrow of the Nyiginya Tutsi monarchy in 1959, and the reconquest of power...
In mid-October, former President Joseph Kabila (2001-2019) of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) announced the launch of a new political coalition consisting of the Rwandan M23 rebel group, which controls the eastern DRC city of Goma where Kabila now resides.
A DRC government spokesman said that Kabila—who was sentenced...
I just saw The Burial, a 2023 film based on real events and people.
The main actors, Tommy Lee Jones and Jamie Foxx, represent Jeremiah Joseph O’Keefe, a funeral home owner, and Willie Gary, his lead lawyer, who sued Ramon Loewen, a funeral owner shark with hundreds of, what he...
Radhika Desai is a Professor of Political Studies at the University of Manitoba, Winnepeg, Canada, Director of its Geopolitical Economy Research Group, and Convenor of the International Manifesto Group. Ms. Desai is an author of multiple books, including Geopolitical Economy(2013) and her most recent Capitalism, Coronavirus and War(2022). Ms. Desai hosts a fortnightly show, Geopolitical Economy Hour on the Geopolitical Economy Report website.
Yan Pan is a Chinese PhD researcher at LUT University, Finland. Her work examines the political economy of China’s technological and industrial development, with a particular focus on the industrialization and governance of neurotechnology in China. Her research concerns industrial policy models for future industries in Chinese and Global South contexts. Prior to her PhD, she researched educational reforms and structural change in labor demand in China.
Ken Hammond is professor emeritus of East Asian and Global History at New Mexico State University. He has lived and worked in China from time to time since 1982. A lifelong political activist, he is a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation.