This morning’s New York Times reports protests from members of Congress over the FBI’s repeated abuses of the Patriot Act to spy illegally on citizens. Glenn A. Fine, the inspector general of the Justice Department, reported that the use of “national security letters,” authorizing warrentless spying, had escalated: There were 8,500 in 2000, the year …
There is a persistent story that people who stood up to fascism in the 1930s, before World War II took shape, were later condemned as “premature antifascists.” Some of the members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, volunteers who fought the fascists in Spain in 1936-39, described facing this opprobrium when they later attempted to join …
I’m on the road again, Chicago this time. (Come catch my talk at Columbia College on Thursday if you’re in the area.) But wherever I go, there’s a certain through-line to the travel experience—not only the ritual airport ceremony of exposing one’s gels and liquids, but the fact that I watch the morning news on …
“Not everyone has drunk the Kool-Aid,” said my friend, calibrating the precise level of fanatic devotion practiced by her colleagues on an especially consuming project. Then I heard it on a TV program: the mother-figure of a somewhat suspect group offered glasses of red liquid to two bright-eyed teenagers: “Kool-Aid anybody?” “Don’t worry,” she said, …
I spent Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) with my Jewish Renewal community, a cohort that prizes creative liturgy, ecstatic chant, guided meditation and socially conscious sermons—just my style. Because one intention of the holiday is to turn toward life and away from whatever embitters it, many of the leaders talked about the terrible suffering …
What do Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and U. S. president George W. Bush have in common? Thrusting ego, overwhelming confidence in their own rightness (whether they believe themselves to be anointed by God or History) and belligerent readiness to get up in their opponents’ faces and give them what for. Last …
Last month I quoted Gandhi on inner guidance. “For me, he wrote, “the Voice of God, of Conscience, of Truth or the Inner Voice or the still small Voice mean one and the same thing.” The Torah reading for the week just ending underscores the same truth, exhorting the people to follow what they know …
My friend was speaking of a well-known Israeli peace activist who, at the start of the bombing, had come out publicly in support of the war in Lebanon. “He has trouble maintaining a big view,” she said, “when he’s in fear of his life.” No kidding. So do we all. In fact, it’s hard-wired into …
It is reputed that Sigmund Freud died asking this question: What do women want? Everything, I suppose. This week, I discovered one surprisingly specific answer. If I could take a pill that achieved the effects of daily exercise, I would. But my desire for a hale and limber golden age easily trumps my indolence, so …
Shame seems to be a driving force in American politics these days. The Europeans have managed to shame us into ending many of the secret deals on that continent that established sites for “extraordinary rendition,” defined as the incarceration and interrogation of unindicted, untried suspects in the “War on Terror.” (Unfortunately, CIA “black sites” and …