A long time ago, when I was a young artist-organizer obsessed with questions of artists’ rights and livelihood, I used to give talks to groups of artists. I often began with the archetypal tale of Sleeping Beauty, in which Beauty must slumber hopefully, entirely passive until kissed into life by the prince. That was the …
Sometimes life delivers moments of irrefutable insight, shattering fragile illusions like so many soap-bubbles. Remember that post-Katrina telethon where Kanye West said, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”? There was a great commotion, the President’s compassionate conservatism was vigorously asserted, West was condemned for incivility. Now, five years later, take a look at New …
Could everybody please stop for a minute and take a breath? A milestone has been reached, one we might best commemorate by a collective inhalation, sending a little oxygen to the national forebrain, which seems to be suffering the symptoms of acute deprivation. The scapegoating of Shirley Sherrod, the Agriculture Department official who was forced …
On July 1, education leaders in Burlington, VT removed from her post a school principal who was, by all reasonable accounts hugely admired and wildly successful at loving and educating the pupils in her charge. According to the New York Times, Joyce Irvine of Wheeler Elementary School… [W]as removed because the Burlington School District wanted …
The gulf between practice and preaching is vast enough to swallow almost anything, but I am beginning to think we have something caught in our collective throat. Despite all our claims for the higher virtues of compassion, truth, and altruism, our common culture has persisted in attaching a positive presumption to material success. Those who …
As the U.S. pauses from work to celebrate freedom, what national liberation do you desire? At the risk of seeming ridiculous, I’d love the public interest to awaken from its self-imposed trance, putting the people’s business before self-serving politics. When a pig flies, you say? Look north, up in the sky, what’s that pink blob …
“The personal is political.” If you were sentient in the sixties and seventies, you heard it almost daily. No doubt, you also said it now and then. It still echoes occasionally around the Zeitgeist, but with a less commanding tone. It’s been a little over a year since I left a decades-long marriage, and I …
So many of us want to make things better: the world, our lives, the lives of others. Some are driven by a vision; if not the lion and lamb cuddling up together, at least a greater harmony and wholeness. My generation of thinkers and activists is swathed in that desire. Looking back, I see this …
At times like this spring, when I’ve been on the move and meeting deadlines pretty much non-stop, my policy of blogging only when the spirit sparks me tends to bog down. Life takes on a hamster-wheel quality, and the poor pooped hamster has few insights worth sharing. My favorite philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, is famous for …
I’ve been talking about “paradigm shift” a lot lately, much to the annoyance of people who are tired of seeing that rubric misused and overused. But bear with me, because it is apt and irreplaceable sometimes, and one of those times is now. If you haven’t already read the introduction to Tony Judt’s new book, …