It’s been one of those times when the pace of events—both interior and exterior—accelerates almost beyond reckoning. Granted, these days I get much of my news from “The Daily Show,” but still: Inauguration! Republican vote-rigging! Somalia! Egypt! I had a birthday with all the attendant thrill and agony, met a bunch of deadlines, and—big news …
I had a conversation last week with someone who gave up making films to start a business he hopes will earn enough money to finance major social-change organizing projects. He condemned progressives for their illusions, saying they that think if they’ve watched a hard-hitting film, they’ve done something, but really, “they’ve done nada. The most …
One feature of the history of ideas is a persistent belief in progress that isn’t disrupted by learning that trendy ideas often turn out to be as flawed as the silliest old ones. Part of the problem has got to be a deficit of reality-testing: how often do you go back to reality-check your expectations, …
These are tender times. The usual end-of-the-year retrospective ache has been amplified in the aftermath of so many storms, inner and outer. It’s often hard to know whether an ambient mood is the aggregate of personal response to the brokenness we are perceiving in world events or the opposite: a projection of personal angst onto …
Of this I have no doubt: the U.S. urgently needs meaningful gun control. I support the four-point platform of the Law Center To Prevent Gun Violence shared in Benjamin Van Houten’s Yes Magazine piece (written after Representative Gabrielle Gifford’s shooting in 2011). It’s been making the rounds again after the massacre perpetrated by Adam Lanza …
It’s that time of the year again, when my inner voices have an unending argument that may even sound a little like some families’ Christmas-dinner conversation writ large: You don’t understand how I feel! The whole world isn’t about you! Why do I have to play by your rules? The word for today, dear readers, …
As I write this, my plane has just taken off from Heathrow, seven hours after its scheduled departure. I spent six of them on the tarmac, trying to soothe the part of my brain that was spinning a story about British Airways’ incompetence. That was fairly challenging: during the previous hour, I’d stood in the …
Few things make me as happy as discovering a way of seeing the world that illuminates both large political events and my own inner voices. I’m happy right now, because I’m ready to add another name to my list of uncolonized minds—the thinkers who have most inspired me through their willingess to engage reality, interrogate …
In English, we say “Shhh” to mean “Quiet down.” In Yiddish, it’s “Sha.” If a nightmare sent me into inconsolable sobs, my grandmother would say, “Sha, sha, bubeleh, don’t scare yourself, it’s only a dream,” and that gave me some comfort. My grandmother was a tiny, ruthless person with biceps like Popeye’s mother. Her repertoire …
Lately, I’ve been on the road a lot for speaking engagements, the proximate cause of a temporary lapse in my blogging. But I could have squeezed it in somehow: I’ve often spent airport hours blogging or eased my re-entry home with a new essay. Truth be told, this political moment has left me at a …