Ariel Dorfman

Ariel Dorfman is an Argentine-Chilean-American novelist, playwright, essayist, academic, and human rights activist. A citizen of the United States since 2004, he is an emeritus professor of literature at Duke, is the author of the play Death and the Maiden, the upcoming novel Darwin’s Ghosts, and a new book of essays, Homeland Security Ate My Speech: Messages From the End of the World.

Supreme Court

Judgment Day for America’s Worst Supreme Court Justice

Ariel Dorfman

( Tomdispatch.com ) – At least I had the courage to do the deed myself. That counts for something here on the other side of death, where I wait for you, Clarence Thomas, and your sharp-toothed wife Ginni, and someday the others whose decrees and rulings from afar have aided and abetted the mayhem and […]

Culture

How Spanish Can Help Us Survive Viral Times: A Journey into the Heart of a Language We Need Now More Than Ever

Ariel Dorfman

“Una nación bajo Diós, indivisible, con libertad y justicia para todos.” ( Tomdispatch.com) – When Jennifer López shouted out that last line of the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish during Joe Biden’s inauguration ceremony, like so many Spanish-speaking Latinos in the United States I felt a sense of pride, a sense of arrival. It was […]

Donald Trump

How Trump gathered us all into Dante’s Lowest Level of Hell, his Natural Home

Ariel Dorfman

( Tomdispatch.com ) – For some time now, I’ve wanted to send Donald Trump to Hell. I mean this literally, not as a figure of speech. I want him to inhabit the palpable, sensory Hell that religions have long conjured up with scenes of sulfur, damnation, and screams of perpetual pain from those who once […]

Colonialism

Human Zoos in the Age of Trump

Ariel Dorfman

Durham, NC (Tomdispatch.com) – When Donald Trump recently accused “illegal immigrants” of wanting to “pour into and infest our country,” there was an immediate outcry. After all, that verb, infest, had been used by the Nazis as a way of dehumanizing Jews and communists as rats, vermin, or insects that needed to be eradicated. Nobody, […]