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 …
Buy The Intercessor paperback or ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, or Ingram! With this post, I’m reviving the “Something Delicious” series I paused in 2012. This revival is part of my personal campaign to reconnect with the beauty that so often inspired me to write before I allowed my alarm at all that …
Buy The Intercessor paperback or ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, or Ingram! I think and talk and write a lot about culture, understood as the complex of ideas, symbols, customs, creations, activities, beliefs, and structures that characterize a particular community or heritage. Here in the U.S., people tend to be somewhat familiar with …
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 …
Life imitates art sometimes. The Intercessor, my new book, is a novel made of linked stories, each narrated by a different person. They all have one thing in common: the desire for spiritual community in challenging times. I did not set out to write another book. In the early days of the MAGA regime, I …
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 …
What class do you belong to? When I was young, “working class” was a commonsense term. It referred to wage workers, to miners and carpenters and secretaries and waitresses, people who were paid by the hour and mostly lived within modest means. Working class people were the primary constituency for union organizing. They almost all …
This is the second of two essays about a new book that I love (yes, love!): We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. The first one derives a lesson strongly related to the upcoming election from Musa al-Gharbi’s sweeping analysis of “symbolic capitalists.” If you know anyone who has decided …
This is the first of two essays I am writing about a new book that I love (yes, love!): We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. This one derives a lesson strongly related to the upcoming election from Musa al-Gharbi’s sweeping analysis of “symbolic capitalists.” My dream is that some …