Geraldine Ferraro was unrepentant this week as she stepped down from her post on Hillary Clinton’s campaign finance committee after having inserted her foot into her own mouth well past the knee. “If Obama was a white man,” she said, “he would not be in this position.” Trying to make it better, she dissed herself: …
The Germans have a word for it—schadenfreude—joining the words for joy and harm to mean taking pleasure in someone else’s misfortune. The Eliot Spitzer scandal fascinates me because it offers a veritable typology of schadenfreude. Most everyone was briefly shocked—I say, shocked—to learn of the New York governor’s involvement with prostitutes, which we all immediately …
A few days before International Women’s Day (March 8th, yesterday), a friend and I were talking about the results of the Ohio and Texas primaries. I shocked myself to notice how deeply devastated I’d been that Obama hadn’t won big in both states, even though my rational mind knew he was still in the lead, …
George W. Bush is still George W. Bush, busily vetoing the ban on waterboarding and sowing cheerful malice around the world. But let us give him props now for a quite remarkable discourse on the subject of the noose and all it symbolizes.
It’s almost Super Tuesday, and my email inbox is flooded with messages proclaiming that to vote for Obama is to oppress women. Most of them are detailed accounts of discrimination against women from time immemorial, coupled with the suggestion that any criticism of Clinton is internalized sexism. What is most remarkable to me is that …
I spent the last few days with people whose work in the world combines art and social justice, mostly the community-based and collaborative work I’ve written about for decades. As a group, we tend to be simultaneously weary and hardy. The theme that comes to mind is from Pirke Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) 2:21: …
I had another birthday last week, on the whole an experience far superior to not having one. But growing older is such a crazy quilt of joy and angst: as the inner library of experience expands, you know more, see more, feel more, have more choice in almost every matter; and all the while, despite …
“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 …
Ten best lists are thick on the ground now. Amidst the arcane little films that go into narrow release in December so critics can add them to their lists, you will find the name of one documentary popping up again and again: No End In Sight: The American Occupation of Iraq. If success in art …