Twenty-five years ago
— as the U.S. prepared to invade Afghanistan — Tom Engelhardt launched this publication as a form of pushback. TomDispatch began as an informal listserv offering commentary and collected articles from the global media to a select group of Tom’s friends and colleagues. A year later, it gained its signature moniker and has been providing “a regular antidote to the mainstream media” ever since.
As TomDispatch evolved into a proper publication, it became a stalwart of the independent media ecosphere and a clearinghouse for critical voices, from Barbara Ehrenreich and Chalmers Johnson to Andrew Bacevich and Ann Jones. It served as a syndication service for the left side of the internet, providing thousands of articles to sites like Alternet, AntiWar.com, Common Dreams, The Nation, Salon, and many others.
Devoted to well-crafted, longform writing and typified by tough-but-measured commentary and hard-hitting essays, TomDispatch was a throwback to an earlier era of old-fashioned American muckraking journalism and iconic publications like I.F. Stone’s Weekly. It succeeded because Tom understood something fundamental about writers, about readers, and
about the world after 9/11
and what people needed to navigate it.
A longtime book editor with a preternatural skill to slip, like a ghost, inside a good manuscript and turn it to gold, Tom used those same skills to publish three polished essays a week for more than two decades. He made good writers great and great writers better. His most astonishing feat may have been turning the ramblings of a grad student with a penchant for run-on rants into something readable. That was me, and because of Tom, I’m writing this intro today. Tom turned over the reins of TomDispatch to me back in June, but you can still read excellent commentary from him, twice weekly, at his
Substack
.
Tom has been fighting the good fight for his entire adult life, employing the written word — as a reporter, an essayist, an editor — i

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