Michael Brenner

Michael Brenner is a professor of international affairs at the University of Pittsburgh.

The APA Wants Back into Gitmo – and the Pentagon’s Good Graces

A trip to an American Psychological Association convention revealed an attempt to get back into Guantanamo Bay after a scandal with the CIA and Pentagon as well as a profession that is enamored with its own power, reports Michael Brenner.

Michael Brenner
By Michael Brenner
Guantanamo

A convention of professional specialists is always revelatory – if not always intellectually edifying. This is especially true of academic disciplines in the Liberal Arts. It is a species of social institution that bears its American birthmark. Now spread throughout the developed world, it was born in the United States and evolved into its present

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The Death Of America’s Common Man

Modern America’s obsession with self and success has killed off what once was an honorable American archetype, the Common Man, who was the nation’s backbone for generations.

Michael Brenner
By Michael Brenner
A worker takes part in the manufacturing of hats the Bollman Hat Company in Adamstown, Pa. (AP/Matt Rourke)

America’s Common Man exists no more – gone and forgotten. Once he was lauded as the salt of the earth – our country’s embodiment of what made us special, of what made the great democratic experiment successful, of what made of the United States the magnetic pole for the world’s masses. Politicians paid their rhetorical respects, poets exalted

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