Facebook has been a forest of assertions and denunciations this week. Maybe it’s the company I keep, but almost everyone is posting links at an accelerated rate, and the subject of this battle of citations is Israel-Palestine. I spent a remarkable amount of time reading blogs and essays, but still, I was able to consume …
Have you been reading lately about “trigger warnings?” These are alerts to those who find themselves in a college classroom or other public setting, warning them that some of the material they are about to experience may upset them. The idea is that those who have had traumatic episodes—assault, for instance—might experience symptoms of post-traumatic …
At dinner with friends recently, the subject of rents came up. It’s a big topic around San Francisco, because an influx of new money (from hi-tech, mostly) and other factors have made that city a landlord’s delight. When they moved out of their two-bedroom apartment, our friends told us, the landlord raised the rent a …
Have you noticed? Money changes everything. Almost daily, I get into conversations about compensation and fairness. Sometimes I even start them. But whoever starts them, by the time they get going, there’s always so much gray area that I have trouble finding my way to daylight. I’m interested to know what you think. Let me …
An enduring pattern has been inscribed on the struggle for cultural equity in this country. Those who get the biggest share of funding—them that’s got, as Billie Holiday put it—pay lip-service to fairness for those who get crumbs—them that’s not. But lip-service is generally the only currency they are willing to shell out. The haves …
Did you ever have something that generated feelings of pride and shame simultaneously, depending on your viewpoint? Something you wanted to share but also wanted to hold close? Something good you didn’t trust to others? I remember a friend who grew up in a northern California Pomo family telling me that her grandmother instructed her …
I am slow to anger, but it really pisses me off when people prescribe for others some purportedly virtuous (or at least dutiful) behavior they’d never embrace in their own lives. In the financial sector, they call it “skin in the game.” Have you risked some of your own money on the advice you are …
Before dinner last night, my husband thought the asparagus I was preparing to grill were too wet, that the baste wouldn’t stick. I doubted it, but I dried them off. He then proceeded to add explanations and persuasions to his case for dryness. “Sometimes I think you’re a sore winner,” I told him. “It’s not …
This has been a strange time in my little world: I’ve been traveling for work while my computer stayed home and lost its mind. I’m glad to say that sanity (i.e., memory, software, and general order) has been restored, and while I still have the sort of compulsive desire to tell the tale that afflicts …
For a year and a half or so, I’ve been an advisor to a new and exciting project, the US Department of Arts and Culture, which is demonstrating the public cultural presence we need in this country by performing it. Watch Deputy Secretary Norman Beckett explain it in a video clip. My role is Chief …