Arlene Goldbard

There are two sides to the human proclivity to view the big world through the little world of our own experience. When I’m depressed, I project my misery outward: the disturbing headlines jump out of the newspaper and pile up at my feet; only the bad news seems true, and the rest recedes. When I’m [...]

Geraldine Ferraro was unrepentant this week as she stepped down from her post on Hillary Clinton’s campaign finance committee after having inserted her foot into her own mouth well past the knee. “If Obama was a white man,” she said, “he would not be in this position.” Trying to make it better, she dissed herself: [...]

The Law of Unintended Consequences says that the unintended consequences of an action are likely to have more impact that the ones that were intended. I have absolutely no doubt that it is correct.
Look anywhere: Hillary Clinton thought attacks on opponents by her husband (who has since been silenced) and herself would damage Barack [...]

Did you know that two-thirds of the people who have lived to age 65 or beyond in all of human history are alive right now? Did you know that in the last hundred years we have gained thirty years in average life expectancy? Did you know that between 2000 and 2020, projected U.S. growth in [...]

A couple of weeks ago, I cleaned out my office. I don’t mean I neatened up, I mean I threw out half the papers and tchotchkes piled on every surface like so many snowdrifts. My innate aesthetic preferences are for order and harmony: I work better, feel better, breathe better under those conditions. But especially [...]

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 [...]

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 friend [...]

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 [...]