Have you got it yet? The Surreal Season Headache-and-a-Half? I start to feel my SSHH! when the presidential election campaigns ramps up during the summer before the election, and the pounding doesn’t usually stop till November at the earliest. It’s an overdose of surrealism, plain and simple: while this over-the-top waste of time and money …
I’ve written often about my conviction that getting big money out of politics is the necessary precursor to anything like a meaningful democracy in the United States. Most recently, it was in “The Impasse”: I continue to believe that purging the electoral system of private money is the key to everything. If big business and …
If the question had been put outright, my friend and I agreed, a supermajority would have voted on our side: Do you want to live in a nation where a few ultra-rich individuals own as much as everyone else put together, have carte blanche to use their wealth to shape public policy, yet feel completely …
Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank and globalization critic, has a must-read essay in the current Vanity Fair, excerpted from his forthcoming book. He analyzes the consensus among plutocrats that our ever-widening wealth disparity is a jolly good thing, and concludes that for their own good, they had better reconsider the flimsy …
What principle do you hold dearest? What sense of American identity matters most to you? If I put a question— say, What do you stand for?—what answer resounds with total conviction? My friend and I were at lunch, discussing our usual topic: The Impasse, aka the gulf between what we know of Americans’ capacity for …
We need a new rallying cry. Van Jones has an idea that’s not quite cooked, but suggestive. On Saturday, someone who heard Jones address a Scott Walker recall rally in Wisconsin tweeted this quote from Jones’ remarks: “Don’t adapt to absurdity.” He was making the point that over time, even what seems preposterous becomes normalized. …
In ancient Greek mythology, the Labyrinth was a kind of maze built at Knossos by Daedalus for King Minos of Crete. It was designed to hold the Minotaur, a mythical creature that was half-man and half-bull. Unlike an ordinary maze, a labyrinth is easy to get into; but once you attain the center, it is …
More than once upon a time, mass protest movements have arisen in this country. In some of these, I have been privileged to witness and take part. If you believe there might be something to learn from experience, read on and judge for yourself. In three sections, I describe my personal experience and the collective …
I’m not planning to break up with President Obama, but he is definitely giving me flashbacks to relationship dysfunctionality. Tolstoy is forever being quoted on the subject: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” But I don’t think he had it right. There’s often a familiar, cyclical character …
There’s a little New Year’s ritual I do. Before midnight, I write on two pieces of paper: one lists all I wish to leave behind in the old year, the other all that I hope will manifest in the new year. Before the old year ends, I burn the first paper down to ash and …