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Beyond Macaca: The Photograph That Haunts George Allen

Virginia Senator George Allen claimed it was a “mistake” when he called an employee of his Democratic foe a racist name. But the leader of America’s top racist group explains Allen’s long and cozy history with white supremacists.

Max Blumenthal

Lebanon: Resolve in the Ruins

As people in Southern Lebanon return to claim the dead and clear the rubble from villages ravaged in the recent fighting, it is clear that the battle for hearts and minds is being won by Hezbollah.

David Enders

Pay To Be Saved

Unless something changes soon, New Orleans will prove to be a glimpse of a dystopic future, a future of disaster apartheid in which the wealthy are saved and everyone else is left behind.

Naomi Klein

Kitchen Stories

As chroniclers of the secret, unexpected, below-the-radar places Americans prepare and consume their meals, NPR’s Kitchen Sisters discovered their microphone has become a kind of stethoscope, listening to the complicated heart of a nation.

The Kitchen Sisters

A World Unmoored by War

The United States now spends more in Iraq in a month that the entire world spends on fighting AIDS in a year. Have we reached the point where the terror of AIDS is no match for the war against terror?

Stephen Lewis

Confronting the Truth about Torture

Despite mounting evidence, Americans remain willfully blind to the government’s barbaric treatment of terror suspects. Now, human rights groups and religious organizations are using testimonies from victims to awaken moral revulsion at what is being done in our name.

Jonathan Blitzer

War Eclipses Gay Pride

Organizers had hoped the second World Pride conference in Jerusalem would challenge religious bias against gays. But the unfolding war in Lebanon got in the way.

Michael Luongo

DC Edges Closer to Representation

The residents of the District of Columbia go to war and pay taxes, but they have never had a member of Congress to call their own. A measure has been introduced in the House that could change all that–maybe.

Sam Schramski

Angrily Awaiting a Messiah

In Mexico City and beyond, tensions are rising between government security forces and thousands of impoverished supporters of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a restive constituency to which political parties and process are increasingly irrelevant.

John Ross

Blackwater Shot Down in Federal Court

A federal appeals court has ruled a wrongful death lawsuit can proceed against Blackwater USA: Families claim the firm cut corners in pursuit of profit in Iraq, leading to the brutal deaths of four employees in Fallujah in 2004.

Jeremy Scahill

A Right to Food?

Hunger is a violation of basic rights: a right to food, but more important, Bolivian and Brazilian experience suggests, a right to power.

Frances Moore Lappé

Black Farms, Black Markets

For black farmers, succeeding financially and bringing healthy food to urban markets remains an uphill battle against a lack of business contacts.

Habiba Alcindor

How Harlem Eats

Urban restaurateurs, activists and consumers are seeking “food justice,” insisting that healthy food shouldn’t be a privilege for the wealthy and white.

Mark Winston Griffith

Edible NOLA

A new charter school is embracing “eco-gastronomy”–a holistic curriculum based around food–hoping “to renew New Orleans one okra plant and one child at a time.”

Randy Fertel

Doing Lunch

Ann Cooper, gourmet chef turned healthy school food advocate, talks about becoming a “lunch lady” and what it takes to reform our children’s cafeterias.

Anna Lappé

Mean or Green?

Wal-Mart is serious about bringing organic food to the masses, but transportation costs and the retail giant’s aggressive competitive ways could end up hurting small farms and the environment.

Liza Featherstone

Hog Hell

Low wages, segregation and dangerous working conditions in a North Carolina factory reveal a meatpacking industry where labor laws no longer matter.

Eric Schlosser

Hard Labor

The organic label means your food is pesticide-free, but an investigation into California farms reveals that the label means nothing but pain for the workers who produced it.

Felicia Mello

One Thing to Do About Food: A Forum

How do we fix our dysfunctional relationship with food? Alice Waters leads a forum with Eric Schlosser, Marion Nestle, Peter Singer and others, who suggest, for starters, that we stop buying factory farm products, get involved in farm policy and outlaw the marketing of junk food to kids.

Jim Hightower, Eric Schlosser, Peter Singer, Eliot Coleman, Vandana Shiva, Carlo Petrini, Winona LaDuke, Elizabeth Ransom, Troy Duster, Wendell Berry, Michael Pollan and Marion Nestle

Slow Food Nation

Fast food is killing us–our environment, our politics and our culture. To change who we are as a nation, we must first change how we eat.

Alice Waters

Monsantopoly

Anna Lappé and Matthew Willse

Bush’s Plebiscitary Presidency

Thanks to an acquiescent Congress, we are now being governed by an Administration that is radically trying to change the nature of our democracy.

Barney Frank

Dorothy Healey

An appreciation of one of the last members of the left’s "greatest generation," known for her physical courage, warmth and intelligence, who spent a lifetime arguing eloquently for socialism, feminism and peace.

Mike Davis

The Food Issue

Since we’re a weekly magazine, “slow” is not a quality we often find ourselves working to achieve.

The Editors

Cedar Devolution

The UN cease-fire in Lebanon demands the impossible: a Lebanese state capable of both disarming Hezbollah and protecting the south from renewed Israeli attacks.

Joseph Logan

Fallout in Israel

Israel’s war with Hezbollah may have strengthened the hand of the Israeli right, which has forgotten that peace comes only by negotiating with those you do not trust.

Eyal Press

Debating Security

The alleged British terror plot contrasts with the fruits of Bush’s “war on terror”: civil war in Iraq, an empowered Iran and Arab hatred. Let us instead seek security through diplomacy.

The Editors

Honey, We Killed the Planet

As the generation of power brokers over 40 continues to blow off global warming, our dependence on a waning supply of oil will create a miserable future for their children and grandchilden.

Nicholas von Hoffman

Clinton’s Blindness on Welfare Reform

You’d think Bill Clinton doesn’t know the difference between getting mothers and their children off the welfare rolls and getting them out of poverty.

Robert Scheer

Wrong War, Wrong Word

“Islamo-fascism” looks like an analytic term, but it’s really an emotional one, intended to get us to think less and fear more.

Katha Pollitt

Israel on the Slide: Who’s to Blame?

The Israeli press has criticized the Lebanon disaster from all political angles. The American press chooses to cheerlead instead, while liberal Jewry remains silent.

Alexander Cockburn

Presidential Eating Preferences

Everyone knows what his predecessors liked for dinner. But there’s one special dish we’d really like to serve George W. Bush.

Calvin Trillin

Eat Drink Man Woman

Three new books by Julia Child, Anthony Bourdain and Bill Buford chart the evolution of American cooking, from haute cuisine to the hot kitchen of Mario Batali.

Matthew DeBord

A Sort of Homecoming

“The spell of Africa is upon me,” wrote W.E.B. Du Bois in Liberia. Three new books document the enchantment and disenchantment of the continent for its descendants.

Hazel Rowley

Virtual Catastrophe

World Trade Center‘s hero is a tough ex-Marine who later re-enlists to fight in Iraq. But his (and Oliver Stone’s) redemption narrative is soured by bad faith.

Stuart Klawans

Four-Star Food Favorites

No sooner had we pressed “send” on an e-mail inviting readers to tell us about their most beloved food institutions than enthusiastic submissions began to pour in from all over the country.

Our Readers

Food for Thought

Letters from around the country describe your favorite food institutions.

Our Readers