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 …
Yesterday was the 57th anniversary of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, of which the first article reads as follows: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. Here is what I have …
I saw my first lit-up house on Wednesday, rather lovely with swathes and swags of white light draped like crystals on a chandelier and the shape of a sleigh picked out in white and red on the front lawn. I saw my first lit-up house and my heart sank as I thought, “Oh, no, it’s going to be bad this year.”
So this is a cathartic essay, written in hopes of purging my expectation of seasonal despair. You see, I’m not a Scrooge. I’m a disappointed product of twentieth century American culture, and Christmas is for me the supreme symbol and expression of my alienation from that culture. Some years, it really pinches.
I grew up in an optimistic fifties suburb populated with the white ethnic veterans of World War II and their young families. The school I attended was one of those California Bauhaus bastards, thrown up without niceties to accommodate the fast-multiplying products of the Baby Boom. There were just a few other Jewish kids whose parents, like mine, were recent immigrants from the east coast, who’d taken advantage of the GI Bill to muster out in California and become proud owners of a tract home with its own little scrap of lawn, its scrawny sapling, its picture window looking out on more of the same. I could identify each and every one of those kids because we met up every December in the library, where we were sent while the rest of the class practiced Christmas carols.
Two stories in the “Science Times” section of today’s \New York Times\ have set me to thinking. One concerns the brouhaha over teaching evolution, focusing on scientists’ distress at the subtle ways in which the Kansas Board of Education redefined science in its new science standards, adopted last week. Dalai Lama wrote of his own …
Tuesday mornings I try to go to the local farmers’ market. Almost all the vendors are Asian or Latino, so there are lots of interesting herbs and vegetables to try along with the onions and apples. One vendor offers an ever-changing array of tree fruit from his farm in the San Joaquin Valley. He is …
Here’s the good news and the bad news in a single sentence: Yesterday, UNESCO member states have a “Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions” and they did it over the strongest possible objections by the U.S. government. The U.S. State Department called on National Endowment for the Arts Chair …
Things are hard, so I am in the mood for sad, beautiful music. Happily, providence has sent me some. I have been listening obsessively to I Am A Bird Now, the latest from Antony and The Johnsons. Antony Hegarty’s music is a genre- (and gender-) bending amalgam of art song, doo-wop and gospel, all layered …
Have you seen the two almost-identical AP photos making the rounds, one of a young black man wading through chest-high floodwaters trailing a bag of groceries, the other of a white couple doing the same? The first photo is captioned ” A young man walks through chest deep flood water after looting a grocery store….” …