While the rest of the world is ho-ho-ho-ing, I’ve been oh-no-no-ing, pounding out what the friend who advised me to write them calls “anger chapters.” Lately, I’m on this path of inquiry into absolutely everything, and now it’s anger’s turn. You see, I don’t usually get very far with anger. Most of the time, I [...]
It is intrinsic to my nature to see possibility, to see it with precisely the type and intensity of focus a donkey brings to the carrot swaying on a stick before its eyes, and like the poor donkey, to follow it until I can’t.
Some of my hopes went on past the point of possibility, wearing [...]
President Obama has appointed 25 new members to the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, a Reagan-era creation that combines representatives of federal cultural agencies (i.e., National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the U. S. Department of Education, the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, [...]
Dear President Obama:
I appreciated your Rosh HaShanah message to Jewish Americans last week, especially the line that read, “Let us resist prejudice, intolerance, and indifference in whatever forms they may take.” You declared that on this occasion, “We rededicate ourselves to the work of repairing this world.”
The time has come to translate these words into [...]
Three days ago, in an essay about the scapegoating of green jobs advisor Van Jones, who was hounded out of office by wingnut Fox commentator Glenn Beck, I wrote this:
We must act now to put a brake on scapegoating before it once again becomes the force that controls public life. The issue will not die [...]
We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.
Dr. Martin Luther King
In the Hebrew calendar, this is the time of t’shuvah, literally turning, but often translated as repentance. In preparation for the new year, [...]
It’s hard not to have an ambivalent relationship with political power, no matter how modest. There’s some truth to the notion that the people who most crave it are least reliable when they have it; but no more truth than there is to the idea that those who are negatively oriented to power will never [...]
What is the extent of our capacity for imaginative empathy? When is it easy to put oneself in the place of other, and when is the stretch too far to manage?
I don’t have much trouble imagining how Henry Louis Gates felt earlier this week when he was arrested at the door of his own home.
I [...]
The radio is blasting Michael Jackson features. All of them end with the same note, that he was planning a “comeback tour.” It appears he had to leave to come back, as befits a figure whose early dive into the oceanic adoration of celebrity turned his life inside out.
I find myself thinking this morning of [...]
This is the first section of a talk I gave on 19 June 2009 at the National Summit of Ensemble Theaters, meeting at the University of San Francisco. Click here to download the full text.
I’ve just moved back to California, part of a big life-change for me. Whenever I come here, I touch down with [...]
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