With the wreckage
of the Twin Towers still smoldering in October 2001, Tom Engelhardt started sending emails to a select group of friends and colleagues to make sense of that increasingly imperial moment.
Tom was a renowned book editor with an eye for the idiosyncratic masterpiece: Studs Terkel’s oral histories, Matt Groening’s pre-Simpsons “Life Is Hell” books, Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Maus,” Chalmers Johnson’s prescient “Blowback,” among them.
In November 2002, TomDispatch gained its name and quickly became a staple of the progressive media landscape, providing its readers “a regular antidote to the mainstream media,” as its tagline reads. Over the following 20-plus years, TomDispatch grew into a home for thoughtful and provocative writing that questioned American empire. It’s published thinkers including Johnson, Andy Bacevich, Mike Davis, Barbara Ehrenreich, Ann Jones, Howard Zinn, and many others; and has been syndicated by publications such as The Nation and Salon; cited in newspapers from the New York Times to the Washington Post; translated into more than a dozen languages; and read by millions.
After a quarter-century of publishing groundbreaking essays at a breakneck pace, Tom has handed over the reins of the site he has built into an institution of progressive media. And he has entrusted TomDispatch to me, and to The Intercept.
I’ve been a TomDispatch reader since its earliest days, and a contributor for more than two decades, rising from research director to managing editor, and editing thousands of essays along the way. I also authored hundreds of TomDispatch articles of my own, covering U.S. national security and foreign policy, and reported from locales as diverse as the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City to former U.S. battlefields in Vietnam to a killing field in South Sudan.
I also worked as a freelance reporter, specializing in exposing crimes of war. A decade ago, I began writing for The Intercept, reporting fro

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