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No Nukes Is Good Nukes
May 3, 2005
An interview with longtime anti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott
By Gregory Dicum
In 1971, Helen Caldicott had an epiphany: all life on earth could end at any moment, simply because a few pig-headed people imagined they could “win” a nuclear war. A decade later, she had given up her promising medical career to devote her life to nothing short of saving the world.
Her urgent Australian twang became a sane voice in a world gone mad. In 1985, the Caldicott-inspired International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War won the Nobel Peace Prize. The organization beat out Caldicott herself, who had been nominated by Linus Pauling, the renowned chemist, anti-nuclear activist, and 1962 Nobel Peace Prize winner.
Our Cars, Ourselves
Wednesday, December 8, 2004
Just before Thanksgiving, I went down to the San Francisco Auto Show, giving up a gorgeous and sunny Sunday afternoon to wander around the cavernous bowels of the Moscone Center. The air was close with that new-car smell, and the hundreds of shiny, shiny cars gleamed as though in some kind of virtual-reality spaceport — like the future was there somewhere, struggling to emerge.
This is Not America
March 25, 2003
Pranas Ancevicius, my maternal grandfather, was intercepted by the German navy while trying to escape the Baltics for Sweden in 1944. An anti-Stalinist intellectual, Pranas had sensed the impending return of the Red Army to his native Lithuania. Caught between two loathsome regimes, he made his way to Nazi Berlin, where he hid with his family under cover of the right combination of documents. (more…)