Not along ago, I visited a friend who is deeply plugged into the sound-the-alarm networks I sometimes find it easy to dismiss: Y2K! Avian flu! And so on. As soon as I walked in the door, she said this: “I’m worried that they’re going to declare a national emergency and suspend the next election—a coup.” …
I gave a couple of talks in a distant city a few weeks ago, one on each day of a two-day conference. That entailed being introduced several times, first as Goldfarb, then Goldberg. Everyone whose heritage diverges from this country’s uncannily persistent normative WASP-philia collides with prejudice on a regular basis. The garbling of my …
Not long ago, my husband and I took a very brief trip to Seattle. It was an incredible day, all sparkling fall sunshine and bright autumn leaves, so in the little time we had free, we visited the Seattle Art Museum’s new Olympic Sculpture Park along the waterfront. It’s a lovely setting, with sloping hillsides …
I like to think of myself as emotionally evolved, but lately I’ve begun to question the feeling of security that gives me. After all, every person comes equipped with the same brain chemical and glands that armed our ancestors for terrifying encounters with four-legged predators. The brain regions called amygdalae are perpetually on guard for …
One key trope of sixties activism was “heightening the contradictions.” According to this concept, when social contradictions (such as huge accumulations of wealth in the midst of crippling poverty) became extreme enough, people would get fed up and revolt. I thought of this a couple of weeks ago as I had dinner with a young …
Almost all of what we have to say about nature is actually about culture. Trees in the wild are nature, but human beings’ relation to those trees is an artifact of culture as surely as a painting or a piece of music. That relationship varies greatly depending on place, time, systems of belief and symbology, …
On Sunday, I rode in a wheelchair through the Oakland Airport, experiencing a taste of humbling dismay. I’ve been dealing with a pinched nerve for weeks now, learning through my own complaints how many fellow sufferers there are. (Along with another participant in the meeting I attended, I got down on the floor during the …
I’ve become so addicted to podcasts that I feel antsy if I’m not caught up with my favorite ones. Currently, though, I have the opposite problem: WNYC’s Radio Lab, cohosted and coproduced by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, only has five episodes a year. It takes me a few short walks to listen to five …
My relationship to the idea of God is in constant flux. My one certainty is that literalist, fundamentalist views can’t possibly encompass whatever could be true. The irony is that literalists come from two camps, both of which were evidently established sometime before the invention of metaphor or symbolism. Some literalists are doctrinaire believers, certain …
I have a dear friend who is struggling with the residue of a nightmare childhood. When one has been betrayed by those closest, those who should have been the keepers of trust and love, it is easy to fall into a default setting of fear and defense. Ordinary interactions become minefields, as the person adopts …