Monday is my birthday. (And I’m honored to share it this year with Dr. Martin Luther King, may he rest in peace and may we live to see his dreams come true.) For me, a birthday is an occasion for relentless self-examination, which is how I seem to mark all milestones. I must be making …
Kwame Anthony Appiah, who wrote so eloquently of his own journey between cultures in In My Father’s House, has published a sticky quagmire of an essay, “The Case for Contamination,” in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. I have been thinking about it for days. That such a smart man has succumbed to such muddled, …
Q: What do Jews do on Christmas eve? A: See first-run movies without standing in line. We went to see Brokeback Mountain last night under my favorite film-viewing conditions: three times as many empty seats as full ones. I woke up this morning thinking about how a film that portrays the persecution of the Other …
This just in: the Bush administration is an extremist organization. I have it straight from the godfather of conservatism. I’ve just gotten around to reading a really interesting piece by Tom Reiss in the October 24th New Yorker. “The First Conservative” profiles Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and political theorist Peter Viereck, who could arguably be credited …
In my novel, Clarity, the eponymous new drug enables users to see through imposed realities and false values. Under its influence, a conservative member of Congress awakens to the actual impact of President Bush’s budget priorities and speaks his mind publicly. (There’s a scene with the Cheney family too, but unfortunately it hasn’t come true…yet.) …
For the last week, every spare moment I’ve had my nose stuck in book friends urged on me when I was in Seattle last month: the sci-fi novel Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. It is a rather wonderful evocation of an alternate reality in which children are brilliantly and ruthlessly trained to serve as …
I grew up in a house without books and now one of my standing jokes to visitors who gape at the library-like appearance of my home is that the main motif of my decorating scheme is books. I’ve never counted them, but I just now did a mental inventory, estimating seventeen six-level standing bookshelves throughout …
Call me perverse (and you’re probably right), but I’m sitting here feeling nostalgic for the fifties, thanks to George Clooney’s new film about pioneering TV reporter Edward R. Murrow, Good Night, and Good Luck. If you haven’t already seen it, I urge you to see it now. Here are some of the things that induced …
I’m in Seattle visiting with friends for the High Holy Days. When I lived here a few years ago, I was deeply involved in a spiritual community that had suffered a deep loss, then spiralled into conflict. I had heard that recently, healing was becoming evident. So part of my reason to visit was this: …
The time of the new year is drawing close: Rosh HaShanah begins Monday evening. The process of preparation tests us. For the whole previous month, we dive into the river of time, poking under rocks and peering into dark places, making our soul inventory. Our missteps and misdeeds float to the surface, demanding to be …