If you’re a grumpy, anti-capitalist, nearing middle-aged queer like myself, the June Gay Pride festivities can be really annoying — especially in New York. Because there are five boroughs, the events seem to go on forever. Rainbow striped flags, key chains and booty shorts sprout all over the city, defying the drab earth tones of your camouflage shorts and black tank top. Cheesy dance remixes of even cheesier top 40 songs drown out your reflective folk tunes. Yep, June is no bowl of organic free-trade cherries for the political queers. read more »

“If Allah wanted us to ask questions, he would have made us men.” That was the rule for Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee) in her Bangladesh girlhood in the 1970s. It was the rule when, at 17, she was sent far from home to be the wife of a man more than twice her age, whom she had never met. read more »

the 32 essays in That’s Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation offer a radical skewering of LGBT institutions that mimic their straight counterparts. read more »

76-year-old songwriter and Grandmothers Against the War founder Joan Wile writes about the Times Square grandmothers’ attempt to dramatize their opposition to the war as grandmothers, as nurturers of the generation serving, killing and dying there read more »

Before new drugs are snatched up by the “drug-marinated” West, they must first be screened for overly obvious negative effects. This is done on the bodies of the world’s poor. read more »

In a well-argued book, Shawnee/Lenape lawyer and scholar Steven T. Newcomb outlines how the doctrine of Christian discovery and dominion was used by European monarchs and colonists, and eventually the U.S. courts, to justify the taking of Native American land, through both physical and psychological warfare, and to refuse to grant complete Indian sovereignty today. read more »

Iraq, the crime of our time, has made lawlessness a national pastime. The Democrats have taken impeachment off the table and no one else is looking to hand out arrest warrants anytime soon. Despite this prosecutorial vacuum, the documentary filmmakers of the world have been compiling the evidence and the latest is no other than Errol Morris. read more »

A must-see at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, "War Child" documents the unlikely, awe-inspiring odyssey of Sudanese hip-hop star and former child soldier Emmanuel Jal, who has translated his experience into a powerful advocacy of renaissance for his home country and a voice of redemption for the generation of ‘lost boys’ he became part of. read more »

Activist educator Les Leopold’s The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor solidly establishes union activist Tony Mazzocchi as a hero for our time. read more »

From Times Square’s transformation into Disneyland East and the gated housing complexes of Johannesburg to faux So-Cal suburbs in China and built-to-order private islands in Dubai, playgrounds of the privileged have been popping up at a dizzying rate across the globe. read more »