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When the unknowable future unfolds (since it is unknowable, we may as well expect the Great Awakening as the Great Slumber), someone, sometime might ask you this: “How clueless were you guys back then, anyway?” You can tell that person: “This clueless,” and pull out the New York Times‘ report this week on the great …

A small gray bird lives in a palm tree in my back yard. Every few minutes for the past several weeks, the bird flies straight toward a high window, then pecks at it with vigor and determination. So far the window holds. A friend asked me to write here about the immigration issue. Every time …

Here’s kind of a fun thing. The theater writer and teacher Scott Walters has “tagged” me to take part in a “meme” originated by Laura Axelrod. This virally transmitted unit of cultural information comprises five questions and answers. Its irresistible quality comes from the pure pleasure of talking about oneself, so I predict it will …

A little over a year ago, I wrote a series of three essays about a perceived generation gap between people my age and younger activist artists (click here to find the first; the others come right after). This past weekend, I attended a gathering of a few dozen people across the generations, so I want …

No, it isn’t an exotic bean curd dish at a very special Japanese restaurant. It’s Hebrew for “without form” and “void,” or “formless” and “empty,” as most English versions of Genesis 1:2 translate the Hebrew description of the chaotic state that preceded creation: “And the earth was without form, and void (tohu v’bohu); and darkness …