This is the text of a message I was invited to send to a conference to be held February 24th through March 1st at Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria. Dear Friends: I am so sorry I am not able to join you at Ahmadu Bello University, to take part in your conference “3 Decades+ of …
“Did you know Will Smith is a Scientologist?” my husband asked over tea this morning. Like most people, I’m aware of religious prejudices lodged in dark corners of my mind. As a wise rabbi once told me, Jews tend to have an immune problem with Christianity, having been exposed too early to too painful a …
The absentee ballots have arrived at my house, and I’m voting for Barack Obama. Please stick with me for a few minutes while I take a little detour to tell you why. A friend sent me a link recently to an extremely interesting piece in Wired. Clive Thompson writes about an Australian philosopher who has …
Ever since the New York Times ran a piece on the ancient (and disappearing) profession of scribe in India, I’ve been coping with a case of nostalgia. You see, I love writing letters for other people. There’s something about slipping into another person’s identity, applying my imagination to the best way to say that person’s …
I miss Kurt Vonnegut. His way of poking sharp pins into social illusions produced such satisfying deflationary hisses. Now we are all puffed up, and who will let the hot air out? The other day I was standing in the checkout line at the drugstore. Suddenly, the woman in front of me began speaking loudly, …
It’s that time of year again: piped-in Christmas carols and tinsel thick on the ground, toy marketing at fever pitch, when the good people at Thousand Kites record their annual “Calls from Home” special, broadcasting messages from families on the outside to loved ones locked up. (Read on to learn how to take part.) And …
Why are so many smart people convinced of so many stupid ideas? Last month, in a piece published in anticipation of his new memoir, the certifiably brilliant Nobel Prize-winner (for discovery of the double helix) James D. Watson was quoted in the Times of London as follows: He says that he is “inherently gloomy about …
I gave a couple of talks in a distant city a few weeks ago, one on each day of a two-day conference. That entailed being introduced several times, first as Goldfarb, then Goldberg. Everyone whose heritage diverges from this country’s uncannily persistent normative WASP-philia collides with prejudice on a regular basis. The garbling of my …
One key trope of sixties activism was “heightening the contradictions.” According to this concept, when social contradictions (such as huge accumulations of wealth in the midst of crippling poverty) became extreme enough, people would get fed up and revolt. I thought of this a couple of weeks ago as I had dinner with a young …
Almost all of what we have to say about nature is actually about culture. Trees in the wild are nature, but human beings’ relation to those trees is an artifact of culture as surely as a painting or a piece of music. That relationship varies greatly depending on place, time, systems of belief and symbology, …