Arlene Goldbard

One reason I keep feeling we have an opportunity to change course right now has less to do with politics than with the convergence of science and philosophy. Human beings have always been interested in our own motives, in how our minds work. Introspection helps, but research is teaching us a good deal more about […]

George W. Bush is still George W. Bush, busily vetoing the ban on waterboarding and sowing cheerful malice around the world. But let us give him props now for a quite remarkable discourse on the subject of the noose and all it symbolizes.

I spent the last few days with people whose work in the world combines art and social justice, mostly the community-based and collaborative work I’ve written about for decades. As a group, we tend to be simultaneously weary and hardy. The theme that comes to mind is from Pirke Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) 2:21: […]

I had another birthday last week, on the whole an experience far superior to not having one. But growing older is such a crazy quilt of joy and angst: as the inner library of experience expands, you know more, see more, feel more, have more choice in almost every matter; and all the while, despite […]

Ten best lists are thick on the ground now. Amidst the arcane little films that go into narrow release in December so critics can add them to their lists, you will find the name of one documentary popping up again and again: No End In Sight: The American Occupation of Iraq. If success in art […]

Let me stipulate it upfront: as a form of political action, the full-page ad is not my favorite. Often, such ads are clarion calls to condemnation. Many seem predicated on the hope that the perpetrators of destructive acts will be shamed by such attention. But really, I think they just turn the page and get […]

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.” […]

This has been a week of collecting horror stories of behavior by people who seem to utterly lack a moral compass. As a friend of mine said, “Sometimes the world offends me.” But is it true? Are some people entirely lacking, without moral conscience in the way that someone might be born without wisdom teeth, […]

A few days ago, I received one of those telemarketing calls from the Democratic Party. Usually, as soon as I learn that someone is trying to sell me something over the phone—stocks, carpet cleaning or a cause—I break the connection with a request to be deleted from that group’s list. But this time, the hallucinatory […]

I’ve been chewing on a thought for days: that nearly all the violence in our society is grounded in the perpetrators’ felt sense of powerlessness.
This speaks to an existential paradox: although our days are filled with choices and decisions, in an ultimate sense we are at the mercy of forces far larger than ourselves, […]