Archives

This just in: the Bush administration is an extremist organization. I have it straight from the godfather of conservatism. I’ve just gotten around to reading a really interesting piece by Tom Reiss in the October 24th New Yorker. “The First Conservative” profiles Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and political theorist Peter Viereck, who could arguably be credited …

Very often these days, I am struck by the absurdity of our political situation: people of goodwill find themselves debating questions that in a less anxious and more humane moment would be no-brainers. Take Senator John McCain’s Anti-Torture Amendment to the defense appropriations bill. It would outlaw torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of …

In my novel, Clarity, the eponymous new drug enables users to see through imposed realities and false values. Under its influence, a conservative member of Congress awakens to the actual impact of President Bush’s budget priorities and speaks his mind publicly. (There’s a scene with the Cheney family too, but unfortunately it hasn’t come true…yet.) …

Earlier this week I heard Bruce Springsteen interviewed on NPR’s “Fresh Air.” The occasion was the release of the 30th anniversary edition of his breakthrough album, “Born to Run.” I’ve always liked Bruce, despite some friends’ reservations about his evident patriotism and his particular flavor of masculine assertion (I guess I like them too). But …

Two stories in the “Science Times” section of today’s \New York Times\ have set me to thinking. One concerns the brouhaha over teaching evolution, focusing on scientists’ distress at the subtle ways in which the Kansas Board of Education redefined science in its new science standards, adopted last week.

For the last week, every spare moment I’ve had my nose stuck in book friends urged on me when I was in Seattle last month: the sci-fi novel Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. It is a rather wonderful evocation of an alternate reality in which children are brilliantly and ruthlessly trained to serve as …

Tuesday mornings I try to go to the local farmers’ market. Almost all the vendors are Asian or Latino, so there are lots of interesting herbs and vegetables to try along with the onions and apples. One vendor offers an ever-changing array of tree fruit from his farm in the San Joaquin Valley. He is …

I grew up in a house without books and now one of my standing jokes to visitors who gape at the library-like appearance of my home is that the main motif of my decorating scheme is books. I’ve never counted them, but I just now did a mental inventory, estimating seventeen six-level standing bookshelves throughout …

I have been thinking very hard about The Leadership Question. You know the one I mean: the nation is awakening from the long dark spell President Bush was able to cast on so many of us (“Yeah, but he’s such a nice guy…”). The conditions are coming together for a national learning experience. But whom …