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Can anyone give me the Talmudic citation for the teaching “Please accept my resignation. I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member”? (Just kidding. It’s Groucho Marx.) We Americans have this silly addiction to top 10 (40, 50) lists. I suppose it began as a marketing artifact (and …

The last six months have been some of the most interesting of my life as a writer and speaker. Since New Creative Community was published in November, I’ve been visiting conferences and campuses, giving talks and workshops to artists, activists, funders, policy-makers and students. I’ve met hundreds of people, seen all kinds of work, had …

I’m in Appalachia, watching snow fall on daffodil buds and the new green leaves of day lilies that will bloom, I am told, on the first day of summer. Once again, I’m working with the Thousand Kites project, artists and activists using theater, film and computer media to surface the emerging story of our nation’s …

This morning’s New York Times reports protests from members of Congress over the FBI’s repeated abuses of the Patriot Act to spy illegally on citizens. Glenn A. Fine, the inspector general of the Justice Department, reported that the use of “national security letters,” authorizing warrentless spying, had escalated: There were 8,500 in 2000, the year …

The writer’s lament these days (one of them, anyway) is how many temptations the computer offers. Whenever I stumble over a block on the road to completion, there’s a captivating distraction just a few clicks away. Okay, it’s my lament AND my delight. And now it can be yours, thanks to the dear readers who …

The owner of an elist I take part in posted an article from the New York Times questioning the restrictive role of ethical review panels in controlling academic research. She thought it might spark a lively discussion, but so far, it seems only to have struck a match in my flammable mind.