Yesterday I posted an essay about the spiritual aspects of the pandemic. Today, my topic is political: how addressing the future of democracy and a livable economy are one and the same. I will start with immediate action, then move on to a brief look at the longer term. Last week people were rightfully up …
What can console us in the face of the Great Unknown? I thought I understood that safety was always an illusion: any of us could be struck down at any moment. But having the illusion of safety erased, that’s uncertainty of another magnitude, so vastly out of proportion to the “normal,” default reality that words …
I feel sad this morning. There is blame-slinging all around. It’s all about the last few weeks at the moment, as if all that came before had been forgotten. I’m seeing people blame sexism as the sole cause for defeating Warren, as if her own choices were entirely irrelevant. I’m seeing people focusing on the …
NOTE: I was wondering what might cheer me up when this fictional narrative came to mind. Try to suspend disbelief as you read it. Those few minutes of fantasy may be just what you need. I was cleaning the residence sitting room. As usual, I was tripping on how many McDonald’s wrappers there were and …
Every time I hear a candidate tout “college for all” as an economic and social panacea, something inside me balks, even as huge cheers come up from the audiences gathered for Democratic primary debates. But I hadn’t been able to put my finger on my unease until I read “Educated Fools,” Thomas Geoghegan’s provocative and …
My custom is to avoid mentioning the Present Occupant of the White House by name. One main reason is that he worships his own name; why help that along by repeating it? Another is that contradictions Trump has brought to a head were not of his own making, rather having been cultivated over centuries by …
Where on the integrity scale would you rate a candidate whose background is marked by lies and misdeeds, who is called to account and fails to show up, and who releases a glitzy campaign ad so mendacious that the Washington Post‘s fact-checker awards it three Pinocchios? I’d give Valerie Plame a zero. Back in June, …
The Great Hack, a new Netflix documentary directed by Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim, is not to be missed. The film explores the question of data rights: privacy, ownership, exploitation, and cultural manipulation. To make a complex story powerful and accessible, the filmmakers used the clever device of following one man’s quest to impel British …
The maxim “the map is not the territory” was coined by philosopher Alfred Korzybski, who also said, “the word is not the thing,” perhaps inspiring Zen teacher Alan Watts’ dictum, “the menu is not the meal.” Experience is deeply affected by (and often confused with) the way we label it. One of Korzybski’s proofs was …
The terrible conundrum of contemporary politics is that everyone is responding to more or less the same forces, but in ways too radically different to be reconciled. Take immigration. Around the globe, people are on the move, many having been forced from their homes by conflicts in their regions or economic and humanitarian crises (e.g., …