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 …
The Law of Unintended Consequences says that the unintended consequences of an action are likely to have more impact that the ones that were intended. I have absolutely no doubt that it is correct. Look anywhere: Hillary Clinton thought attacks on opponents by her husband (who has since been silenced) and herself would damage Barack …
I’ve been a cultural activist all my life, so where I stand on the question of culture is clear: with Augustin Girard when he wrote more than 30 years ago that “Culture concerns everyone and it is the most essential thing of all, as it is culture that gives us reason for living, and sometimes …
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.
My desire to believe there is progress in human history is strong. Clearly, there is change: more people, more stuff, more (or at least different) dangers, more (or at least different) pleasures. But can anything be said with certainty, anything more than “Things change”? Yes, amidst all of the terrible suffering and soaring hopes of …
Did you know that two-thirds of the people who have lived to age 65 or beyond in all of human history are alive right now? Did you know that in the last hundred years we have gained thirty years in average life expectancy? Did you know that between 2000 and 2020, projected U.S. growth in …
This is the text of a message I was invited to send to a conference to be held February 24th through March 1st at Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria. Dear Friends: I am so sorry I am not able to join you at Ahmadu Bello University, to take part in your conference “3 Decades+ of …
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 …
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 …