I have no reason to believe artists are better or smarter than other people, but I know that artists are often skilled at helping others to see the world more clearly, at focusing awareness and attention. Skilled at perceiving patterns, seeing through the surface of things to deeper meanings, using the connections between things as …
One more day to go, not to achieve heaven on earth, but to the relief of anticipating the Present White House Occupant’s exit. For me, that’s also one day closer to the reality of a new WPA, a public service employment program to enlist all kinds of workers in rescuing the public good from the …
Remember the TV series “Monk?” Tony Shaloub plays a brilliant and observant detective who is traumatized, reclusive yet lonely, and often ostracized on account of his extreme obsessive-compulsive disorder. He’s learned to sometimes suppress his forthrightness for others’ comfort, but he doesn’t always succeed. One recurrent trope has him laying out a crime-solving hypothesis that …
Yesterday I posted an essay about the spiritual aspects of the pandemic. Today, my topic is political: how addressing the future of democracy and a livable economy are one and the same. I will start with immediate action, then move on to a brief look at the longer term. Last week people were rightfully up …
I feel sad this morning. There is blame-slinging all around. It’s all about the last few weeks at the moment, as if all that came before had been forgotten. I’m seeing people blame sexism as the sole cause for defeating Warren, as if her own choices were entirely irrelevant. I’m seeing people focusing on the …
The Great Hack, a new Netflix documentary directed by Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim, is not to be missed. The film explores the question of data rights: privacy, ownership, exploitation, and cultural manipulation. To make a complex story powerful and accessible, the filmmakers used the clever device of following one man’s quest to impel British …
Last week I published a piece called “Lying for A Living: Is Valerie Plame Qualified for Public Office?” If you click the link, you’ll see the blog mirrored on Daily Kos, which describes itself as “a site for Democrats.” (I guess my votes qualify me, but I’m not writing this to defend the DNC’s idea …
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 …