I’m giving little attention to the 23-candidates-and-counting race for the Democratic presidential nomination. I figure the ones who are doing it to raise their national exposure, banking name recognition for some future contest, will drop out. I look forward to watching the rest of them duke it out via rallies, debates, and of course, Twitter, …
Everywhere I look, there’s another example of the epidemic entitlement that distorts American society. I’m going to skip right over the Present Occupant of the White House, who walked out three minutes into a planned meeting on infrastructure with Democratic leaders, saying he refused to work with them until they halted all investigations into his …
Revenge or restitution? I’ve been thinking of Paulo Freire’s powerful notion of a thematic universe. He wrote that every epoch is characterized by “a complex of ideas, concepts, hopes, doubts, values and challenges in dialectical interaction with their opposites.” This complex, interacting whole—our thematic universe—weaves the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. Conventionally, historians propose …
When Starbucks founder Howard Schultz announced a few days ago that he was exploring a 2020 run for President as a “centrist independent,” progressive social media exploded with reasons to reconsider. Op-eds proliferated, people began leafleting Starbucks and protesting at Schultz’s speaking engagements. A chief objection is the reality that Jill Stein, running as the …
Back in the day, I had a quote from Wilhelm Reich* over my desk: The nature of the trap has no interest whatsoever beyond this one crucial point: WHERE IS THE EXIT OUT OF THE TRAP? It was the resonant wisdom of this sentence and not the cult of its author that drew me. As …
Jews of my generation are trained from infancy to sense which way the wind is blowing. If you descend as I do from a long line of nomads and refugees—if your family tree is stunted, the branches disappearing into cracks in history, if the images of children being torn from their parents’ arms are imprinted …
In a debate in Flint, MI, on Sunday, Bernie Sanders, asked to describe his “racial blind spots,” said this: “When you’re white, you don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto—you don’t know what it’s like to be poor. You don’t know what it’s like to be hassled when you walk down …
Here’s the note a friend sent me on Facebook late last night: Arlene, now that the midterm results are in, how can the dreams/predictions that you make in your recent books The Wave and The Culture of Possibility come to fruition? How can Citzens United be overturned and democracy be given back to the people? …
I’ve been researching women in the arts and culture for a presentation next week at the Women’s International Study Center’s inaugural symposium. There’s ample information online, and it all tells an unsurprising story (if you’ve been keeping your eyes open). There’s more arts work by women out in the world, and also more work that …
I’m always talking up the power of art and culture to change worlds. Today, I’m going to let the poster child for the paranoid style in American politics make the case for me as he swoons with fear in the face of an art and social change project I’m involved in, one that is barely …