About Tom Engelhardt

Tom Engelhardt created and runs the Tomdispatch.com website, a project of The Nation Institute where he is a Fellow. He is the author of a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture, and of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing, as well as a collection of his Tomdispatch interviews, Mission Unaccomplished. Each spring he is a Teaching Fellow at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

Tomdispatch.com is the sideline that ate his life. Before that he worked as an editor at Pacific News Service in the early 1970s, and, these last three decades, as an editor in book publishing. For 15 years, he was Senior Editor at Pantheon Books where he edited and published award-winning works ranging from Art Spiegelman's Maus and John Dower's War Without Mercy to Eduardo Galeano's Memory of Fire trilogy. He is now Consulting Editor at Metropolitan Books, as well as co-founder and co-editor of Metropolitan's The American Empire Project. Many of the authors whose books he has edited and published over the years now write for Tomdispatch.com. He is married to Nancy J. Garrity, a therapist, and has two children, Maggie and Will.

To find out more about Engelhardt and his background, check out:

Harry Kreisler's interview, "Taking Back the Word", on the Conversations with History website.

Julian Brookes' interview, "Iraq, Bush, and Writing Long", on the Mother Jones website.

Nick Turse's two-part interview on the Tomdispatch website, "Reading the Imperial Press Front to Back" (part 1) and "On Not Packing Your Bag and Heading Home When Things Go Wrong" (part 2).

If you've just stumbled into Tomdispatch, wondering whether Tom Engelhardt is the "Tommy Engelhardt" you once knew, and you're thinking of a boy 11 years old or younger, growing up in New York City, then you probably have the right guy.

About Nick Turse

Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com. He began writing for the site in late 2003, on the subject of the "New Military-Industrial-Entertainment Complex" and has gone on to cover such topics as the U.S. air war in Iraq, military recruiting, and the homeland-security state.

Turse has also written for the San Francisco Chronicle, The Nation, and the Village Voice. His first book, The Real Matrix, an expose on the new military-corporate complex in America, is due out in the American Empire Project Series by Metropolitan Books in 2008.

Turse is also an Associate Research Scientist at Columbia University and the co-author of a major series of articles for the Los Angeles Times, on U.S. war crimes in Vietnam. He is currently at work on a history of U.S. atrocities in Indochina.

About Tomdispatch.com:

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." See the full article.

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." See full article.

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."

Hope in the Dark

Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

By Rebecca Solnit

"Seemingly lost in the woods of deceit and banality, bereft of hope, we are confronted by Rebecca Solnit and her astonishing flashlight. In a jewel of a book that is poetic in substance as well as style, she reveals where we were, where we are and the step-by-step advances that have been made in human rights, as we stubbornly stumble out of the darkness." --Studs Terkel

Nation Books