Ten best lists are thick on the ground now. Amidst the arcane little films that go into narrow release in December so critics can add them to their lists, you will find the name of one documentary popping up again and again: No End In Sight: The American Occupation of Iraq. If success in art …
I miss Kurt Vonnegut. His way of poking sharp pins into social illusions produced such satisfying deflationary hisses. Now we are all puffed up, and who will let the hot air out? The other day I was standing in the checkout line at the drugstore. Suddenly, the woman in front of me began speaking loudly, …
It’s that time of year again: piped-in Christmas carols and tinsel thick on the ground, toy marketing at fever pitch, when the good people at Thousand Kites record their annual “Calls from Home” special, broadcasting messages from families on the outside to loved ones locked up. (Read on to learn how to take part.) And …
Why are so many smart people convinced of so many stupid ideas? Last month, in a piece published in anticipation of his new memoir, the certifiably brilliant Nobel Prize-winner (for discovery of the double helix) James D. Watson was quoted in the Times of London as follows: He says that he is “inherently gloomy about …
I’ve been reading a lot about nutrition lately, as part of my program to age gracefully. I thought I was acquiring information that would help me preserve my good health, and I guess I was. But it turned out my real subject was how scientific blind spots—confirmation bias, foregone conclusions, beliefs that resist reality-testing—obscure the …
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.” …
I gave a couple of talks in a distant city a few weeks ago, one on each day of a two-day conference. That entailed being introduced several times, first as Goldfarb, then Goldberg. Everyone whose heritage diverges from this country’s uncannily persistent normative WASP-philia collides with prejudice on a regular basis. The garbling of my …
Not long ago, my husband and I took a very brief trip to Seattle. It was an incredible day, all sparkling fall sunshine and bright autumn leaves, so in the little time we had free, we visited the Seattle Art Museum’s new Olympic Sculpture Park along the waterfront. It’s a lovely setting, with sloping hillsides …
I like to think of myself as emotionally evolved, but lately I’ve begun to question the feeling of security that gives me. After all, every person comes equipped with the same brain chemical and glands that armed our ancestors for terrifying encounters with four-legged predators. The brain regions called amygdalae are perpetually on guard for …
Almost all of what we have to say about nature is actually about culture. Trees in the wild are nature, but human beings’ relation to those trees is an artifact of culture as surely as a painting or a piece of music. That relationship varies greatly depending on place, time, systems of belief and symbology, …