Arlene Goldbard

By now, I know my tribe: like Lewis Mumford, “I’m a pessimist about probabilities; I’m an optimist about possibilities.” (Or like Gramsci: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”)
If you’re a member too, perhaps you also watched Battlestar Galactica, a sci-fi series that just ended (but will certainly be available in one form or [...]

It’s exciting and scary to be present at a birth. I’m not thinking of the literal kind except as an unimpeachable source of metaphor for the birth of an idea: as with a living being, we look for wholeness and soundness, the fulfillment of hopes in a generous measure of new possibility.
For some time, [...]

We humans are good at condemning other people’s sins of omission. There’s a whole publishing industry around how much the average German knew about Nazi atrocities, for instance, calibrating ordinary people’s exact degree of culpability for what was done in their names. But it’s much harder to admit the same faults in our own and [...]