From utopian experiments with garden cities, to guerrilla gardeners planting on abandoned or misused land, the garden appears to have abundant radical potentialities. Cultural critic George McKay unearths its complex politics, looking at the thorny questions of militarism, gardening, and the fascist right, as well as myriad experiments by those on the left, and concludes that gardens remain a fertile site for political action.

What are the social and environmental costs of building and maintaining military bases and huge monuments? Catherine Lutz is editor of The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle Against U.S. Military Posts. And Cecile Pineda's novel Frieze considers the forced labor that went into the ninth-century construction of the Javanese monument Borobudur.

Pirates off Somalia's coast; an armed insurgency inside that nation; a new US military command called AFRICOM. Will the Obama administration turn its rhetorical emphasis on diplomacy into reality in Somalia, or is the momentum in favor of military intervention? William Minter and Daniel Volman offer their perspectives. And Wilma Bonet directs the San Francisco Mime Troupe's Too Big to Fail.

What can an architect tell us about Israel's mechanisms of control over, and transformation of, the Occupied Territories? In what ways are the territories an Israeli laboratory, and how might pointing to Israel's conduct as illegal be ineffective? Eyal Weizman contends that there is an architecture to the occupation that must be examined and condemned.

The Superferry is not some benign way of connecting the Hawaiian islands. According to Koohan Paik and Jerry Mander, the massive boat is closely connected to US military plans for a new Pacific fleet. It also endangers whales and other wildlife. Paik was part of momentous protests in Kauai that rebuffed the Superferry. Also, David Theo Goldberg comments on Obama and race.