"If you want a picture of the future," wrote Orwell, "imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever." From Schopenhauer to Samuel Beckett, the literature of despair is sad music, but its power to ...

His survivor’s guilt and his grief are inextricably entwined, and at the very end of the book he admits that they breed in him “bogus saintliness” and “masochism.” He also, it seems to me, reveals in ...

“I think I’m American in all sorts of essential ways,” said the 52-year-old war journalist David Rieff the other day, “I think I’m American in all sorts of essential ways,” said the 52-year-old war ...

David Rieff laments the disasters that U.S.-led democracy promotion has caused: To put the matter even more pointedly, after all the harm the United States has done in the Arab Middle East over the ...

Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. David Rieff is the bête noire of the international humanitarian relief and human ...

The duty to remember—especially to remember victims lost to political evil—has become one of the most commanding mantras of our culture. Yet it is astonishing how recently this imperative became so ...

His mother, Susan Sontag was a famous intellectual. But for a woman of uncommon intelligence, her pursuit of truth stopped short of her own mortality—and her grieving son, David Rieff was left to pick ...

I want to take the liberty of republishing here the latest missive from the journalist David Rieff, a man of the Left who despises wokeness, taken from his Substack newsletter, titled Desire and Fate.

A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis, by David Rieff. Simon & Schuster. 384 pages. $26. With the post-Sept. 11 world in turmoil — Zimbabweans starving, Afghanistan in tatters, Israelis and ...

When she was diagnosed with cancer for the third time, the writer Susan Sontag signed on for a harsh treatment regime in the hopes it would keep her alive. But it only added to her suffering. Her son, ...

There’s something obscene about sitting at a desk, in a chair that corrects the posture, sipping warm, sugary tea, yawning or scratching, barely aware of the fug of felt life, all the while getting ...