Let me stipulate it upfront: as a form of political action, the full-page ad is not my favorite. Often, such ads are clarion calls to condemnation. Many seem predicated on the hope that the perpetrators of destructive acts will be shamed by such attention. But really, I think they just turn the page and get …
Not along ago, I visited a friend who is deeply plugged into the sound-the-alarm networks I sometimes find it easy to dismiss: Y2K! Avian flu! And so on. As soon as I walked in the door, she said this: “I’m worried that they’re going to declare a national emergency and suspend the next election—a coup.” …
This has been a week of collecting horror stories of behavior by people who seem to utterly lack a moral compass. As a friend of mine said, “Sometimes the world offends me.” But is it true? Are some people entirely lacking, without moral conscience in the way that someone might be born without wisdom teeth, …
A few days ago, I received one of those telemarketing calls from the Democratic Party. Usually, as soon as I learn that someone is trying to sell me something over the phone—stocks, carpet cleaning or a cause—I break the connection with a request to be deleted from that group’s list. But this time, the hallucinatory …
A small gray bird lives in a palm tree in my back yard. Every few minutes for the past several weeks, the bird flies straight toward a high window, then pecks at it with vigor and determination. So far the window holds. A friend asked me to write here about the immigration issue. Every time …
No, it isn’t an exotic bean curd dish at a very special Japanese restaurant. It’s Hebrew for “without form” and “void,” or “formless” and “empty,” as most English versions of Genesis 1:2 translate the Hebrew description of the chaotic state that preceded creation: “And the earth was without form, and void (tohu v’bohu); and darkness …
I’ve been chewing on a thought for days: that nearly all the violence in our society is grounded in the perpetrators’ felt sense of powerlessness. This speaks to an existential paradox: although our days are filled with choices and decisions, in an ultimate sense we are at the mercy of forces far larger than ourselves, …
Veteran TV journalist Bill Moyers has returned from retirement to inaugurate a new season of Bill Moyers Journal, premiering on April 25th with a program entitled “Buying The War,” which examines the less than glorious role of the American press in the creation of the War in Iraq. After listening to Terry Gross interview Moyers …
What do you suppose the most compassionate person in Iraq thought when the killings at Virginia Tech made headlines last week? Here’s how I imagine it: “What a terrible thing! May their souls rest in peace. Forgive me for saying so, but perhaps the Americans will now begin to understand how we feel when our …
On Friday, I went to rottentomatoes.com to check out the reviews for several films we were thinking about seeing. They all had high scores, meaning most reviewers loved them. But in every case, if you scrolled down far enough, there would be one or two writers who rated them “superficial pap” or something like it. …