Our text for today is the parable of the parboiled frog. You know it: when a frog is dropped into boiling water, it immediately saves itself by jumping out. But when a frog is dropped into a lukewarm bath and the bath is gradually heated to boiling, the poor thing is lulled to death. Is …
I love the idea of protected public space within the culture. National parks are the physical analog for the kind of thing I’m talking about: public libraries, public radio, monuments and murals of the type muralist Judy Baca calls “sites of public memory.” These are spaces of meaning freely available to each and every one …
Two of my readers have given me a lot to think about. They wrote comments on my February 12th blog, “The Fashion in Outrage,” about controversies over art. It contrasted Americans’ huge response to recent domestic literary scandals with our inertia with respect to political ones. From Israel: The fact that “tout le monde” is …
My friend was fulminating about the Bushies: “So their lies are piling up, a huge pile of deceit, and what can we do about it? We just have to sit it out till the next election? Why aren’t people up in arms?” (Maureen Dowd’s Saturday Times column has a good compilation of recent lies, if …
In my last essay, I quoted a line of Paul Goodman’s from forty years ago: “So we drift into fascism. But people do not recognize it as such, because it is the fascism of the majority.” I have been thinking about it ever since, with growing alarm. In one way, it seems insane to call …
Monday is my birthday. (And I’m honored to share it this year with Dr. Martin Luther King, may he rest in peace and may we live to see his dreams come true.) For me, a birthday is an occasion for relentless self-examination, which is how I seem to mark all milestones. I must be making …
Today I want to mark a moment in the history of U.S. cultural policy. At the end of December, the Center for Arts and Culture, the largest and best-funded of the few cultural policy institutes in this country, folded, offering as explanation the unavailability of general operating support. Give me a minute to say why …
Kwame Anthony Appiah, who wrote so eloquently of his own journey between cultures in In My Father’s House, has published a sticky quagmire of an essay, “The Case for Contamination,” in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. I have been thinking about it for days. That such a smart man has succumbed to such muddled, …
The only thing as annoying as mindless religious fundamentalism is mindless atheistic fundamentalism. The current specimen comes from an essay by Sam Harris featured at Arianna Huffington’s site, The Huffington Post. “Science Must Destroy Religion” probably takes the cake as the most arrogant title ever (although to be fair, some other blogger—Harris’s anti-matter equivalent—probably posted …
Q: What do Jews do on Christmas eve? A: See first-run movies without standing in line. We went to see Brokeback Mountain last night under my favorite film-viewing conditions: three times as many empty seats as full ones. I woke up this morning thinking about how a film that portrays the persecution of the Other …