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 …
I come from a long line of refugees. From Adam and Eve cast out of Eden to the exodus from Egypt and forty years’ wandering in the wilderness, the story of the Jews turns on exile and the yearning for refuge. My own maternal grandparents left Russia under cover of night to escape the pogroms …
For the past few days, these lines from Deuteronomy 22:8 have been resounding in my head with the regularity of a heartbeat: “When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet on your roof, so that you do not bring bloodguilt on your house if anyone should fall from it.” A statement’s appearance …
My name is Arlene, and I’m a hypocrite. Remember on April 29th, when I wrote about how the “peak oil” documentary The End of Suburbia, when I wrote about my determination to put up with the inconvenience of a one-car family so as to minimize my complicity with Big Oil? Well, the shelf-life of that …
Controversies about public cultural funding continue to pile up, even though the amount of money involved is insignificant in comparison to taxpayers’ investment in such public-spirited priorities as prisons and weapons of mass destruction. Today’s New York Times carried a piece reporting that a House Appropriations panel recommends cuts of about half in current appropriations …
A good friend visited last night from New York. He’s thoughtful and well-informed, so I always enjoy talking about social issues with him. As in so many political conversations these days, it wasn’t long before we got around to blowing each other’s minds with the surrealism of everyday public life. Starting with the baffling case …
I have — as we say here on the left coast — trust issues. Not the mundane kind: I’m happy to give most people the benefit of the doubt, and more often than not, they prove trustworthy. I’m content to trust the roads to hold me and the sun to rise tomorrow morning. No, I’ve …
The “ownership society” paradigm the Bush administration invokes in its campaign to dismantle Social Security scares me in a very old and deep place, chilling my soul. When I feel the shiver, an image shimmers in my mind, fleeting as a reflection on water: an old woman, wrapped in rags, sitting at the mouth of …
Monday’s \New York Times\ carried an interesting article about how the Bush campaign’s media consultants used consumer market segmentation data to woo the voters they most wanted to reach. (The Kerry campaign tried the same thing; this is a culture-wide phenomenon, not a partisan one.) The article quotes advertising big-wig Donny Deutsch: “The selling of …
Colin Powell has stepped down as Secretary of State, and it appears Condoleeza Rice is going to be his replacement. It also looks like the end of an era of essentialist thinking about race. In a post-election essay that’s been circulating via the Internet, Charles Frederick characterized race as “a concept of no meaning while …