Buy The Intercessor paperback or ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, or Ingram! I’m writing this on a transatlantic flight home from the International Community Arts Festival in Rotterdam, where my friend and podcast cohost François Matarasso and I led two workshops, one on cultural policy and one on ethics. We are grateful to …
Through January 2026, order The Intercessor paperback from Ingram at a 30% discount! And the ebook from Amazon at half off! As the clusterfuck of this last year has unfolded, when I’ve pushed back the curtains of anger and despair—even of hope—that add to my confusion rather than dispel it, I keep having the sensation …
JANUARY SALE! Through the end of January 2026, order The Intercessor paperback from Ingram at a 30% discount! And the ebook from Amazon at half off! I took part recently in a large online convocation about the future of the arts in this country. The 30 or so prominent individuals who conceived and organized it …
I woke up on Monday morning to the news that Jews celebrating Hanukkah at Bondi Beach in Australia were killed—15 as I write—and more than 40 wounded by a father-and-son team of gunmen who festooned their car with homemade ISIS flags. The youngest victim was 10; the oldest an 87 year-old Holocaust survivor. The older …
NOTE: This post is to introduce you to the 58th episode of François Matarasso’s and my monthly podcast, “A Culture of Possibility.” It will be available starting 21 November 2025. You can find it and all episodes at Stitcher, iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts, along with miaaw.net‘s other podcasts by Owen Kelly, Sophie …
A great soul passed this morning. Rabbi Arthur Ocean Waskow, scholar, activist, teacher, spiritual leader, and so much more celebrated his 92nd birthday on October 12th with a Zoom hosted by The Shalom Center, the organization he founded in 1983 and led until last year. The Zoom was also the occasion for sharing the two …
A few days ago I stumbled on a startling truth I want to share with you. Do you know the concept of “mirror worlds?” It has a few meanings. The one I’m using describes a parallel dimension that mirrors the world as we know it, but everything important has been flipped, monsters instead of mates, …
Back in February, when I wrote about the first few deranged actions the MAGA regime took against cultural agencies—”Il Duce Redux: Art Under Trump“—I focused specifically on art, as my title said. One of the things that tends to convince artists of the significance of our work is autocrats’ reliable tendency to go after it …
Twenty years ago, my friend Daniel Burstyn introduced me to an exercise created for Passover, the Jewish holiday which this year begins on the evening of 12 April. The holiday commemorates the exodus from slavery in Egypt (“Mitzrayim” in Hebrew, which also means “straits” or “narrow places”). The tradition is to retell the story as …
I’ve had the same conversation with many friends in the last few days: what is wrong with the Democrats? Why aren’t they responding to the Trump-Musk emergency with the speed and energy required to stop them from (to use Steve Bannon’s repugnant language) “flooding the zone with shit” at “muzzle velocity” and drowning the body …