Arlene Goldbard

The most wonderful thing has come into my life: a new Powerbook laptop. My friend, who’s not a Mac person, inherited it from a friend of his, and generously (miraculously!) passed it on to me. Among its many benefits is that I am now using the newest operating system, which has led me through portals […]

Yesterday’s New York Times carried an interesting column about citizenship tests. The most anxious nations—Britain, Germany, Canada and of course, the USA—have been revising their tests to raise the threshold for citizenship, making sure that prospective citizens get with the program before they are admitted to the club.
The new tests are a fascinating Rorschach […]

In my last essay, I quoted a line of Paul Goodman’s from forty years ago: “So we drift into fascism. But people do not recognize it as such, because it is the fascism of the majority.” I have been thinking about it ever since, with growing alarm.
In one way, it seems insane to call […]

Monday is my birthday. (And I’m honored to share it this year with Dr. Martin Luther King, may he rest in peace and may we live to see his dreams come true.)
For me, a birthday is an occasion for relentless self-examination, which is how I seem to mark all milestones. I must be making […]

Today I want to mark a moment in the history of U.S. cultural policy. At the end of December, the Center for Arts and Culture, the largest and best-funded of the few cultural policy institutes in this country, folded, offering as explanation the unavailability of general operating support. Give me a minute to say why […]

Kwame Anthony Appiah, who wrote so eloquently of his own journey between cultures in In My Father’s House, has published a sticky quagmire of an essay, “The Case for Contamination,” in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine.
I have been thinking about it for days. That such a smart man has succumbed to such muddled, short-sighted […]

The only thing as annoying as mindless religious fundamentalism is mindless atheistic fundamentalism. The current specimen comes from an essay by Sam Harris featured at Arianna Huffington’s site, The Huffington Post. “Science Must Destroy Religion” probably takes the cake as the most arrogant title ever (although to be fair, some other blogger—Harris’s anti-matter equivalent—probably […]