Shortly after Richard Wright's passing in 1960, Julia Wright found hidden in her father's papers the manuscript for A Father's Law, the last unfinished novel by the iconic American novelist.

In a recent essay on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s advocacy for peace, titled "Vocation of Agony: A Personal Meditation on Dr. King's Legacy," Rev. Osagyefo Sekou elaborated a stirring call for deep moral change in America.

Chris Hedges recently published an article called "The Dangerous Atheism of Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris," but he failed to include in it any indication of what he thinks is dangerous about their atheism.

For centuries, the idea that the Sun revolved around the Earth was unanimous. Ptolemy's old system – pretty new if we consider that other Greeks believed that in reality the Earth moved around the Sun – was the "vox populi" on cosmology.

I was disappointed that Daniel Day-Lewis won an Oscar for "There Will Be Blood," not because he's not a great actor (he is), but because the movie was such a betrayal of the book on which it was based.

Driving to the stables the other day – one eye on the road and the other on my half-empty gas gauge – I found myself thinking about Los Angeles.

I just wanted to drop you a note to let you know (if you didn't already) the good news that "Sicko" has been nominated for this year's Academy Award for Best Documentary. It was a pleasant surprise when we got the news on Tuesday.

Detroit, Mich. – An exhibition celebrating the life of Paul Robeson opened here last Saturday, Jan. 19, at Swords into Plowshares Peace Center and Gallery.

Social class is usually treated as though it doesn't exist. But for working families struggling without good jobs or adequate pay, who lack health care or decent housing, the systemic economic divisions that determine their life chances.

Fairly commonly these days, poets end their volumes with a short prose section, usually footnotes or glosses on the poems.

US newspapers were all abuzz this month when Doris Lessing, most well-known for her novel The Golden Notebook, won the Nobel Prize for Literature. (Lessing also raised eyebrows when in an interview she proclaimed that 9/11 wasn't as bad as Americans thought).

Generally, an historical phenomenon is naturalized thanks to an absence of memory (hence the political value of neutrality and forgetting). Obviously not always for political reasons.

When one commits to the life of an active citizen, spending their hours days and years reading and writing about current events, it becomes a daily struggle to overcome the cynicism that chases after you with the despairing headlines marking each newspaper or magazine.

A few days ago the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chαvez, referred to Jesus as the greatest socialist in history. I am not interested here in making a defense or an attack on his person.

The stock markets are plummeting and hundreds are dying daily in Iraq. Perhaps we need some escape from these dismal events by examining a new controversy from the world television entertainment.

Once, in a high school class, we asked the teacher why she never talked about Juan Carlos Onetti. The answer was blunt: that gentleman had received everything from Uruguay (education, fame) and "he had left" for Spain to speak ill of his own country.

Our infinitely mendacious educational, social, and media infrastructures begin inculcating reflexive rejection of "all things communist or socialist" into US Americans from the moment they draw their initial breath.

Freedom, perhaps, may be the main differential characteristic of art. And when this freedom does not turn its face away from the tragic reality of its people, then the characteristic turns into moral consciousness.

In 1992 the Chilean Ariel Dorfman debuted his work Death and the Maiden. Although without specific references, the drama alludes to the years of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship and the first years of the formal recuperation of democracy in Chile.

Since the day I first realized that I was a Communist some thirty-five years ago, there have always been certain things I counted on to keep me in good stead.