Here’s an article by Michael Tomasky that makes an argument that I whole-heartedly embrace. It’s about how, of the two major American political parties, the Republicans’ messaging in the last 30 or 40 years has steam-rolled the Democrats, who seem to be utterly incapable of refuting it or offering something better. The main reason the…
I’m occasionally struck by the media’s juxtaposition of stories with startlingly different headlines. You wonder why editorial chose to put such jarring stories side by side. I came across this one last week: the cruelty of poverty and war . . . and the unabashed abundance of a wealthy nation. The day before yesterday the…
“Neither Democrats nor Republicans will like it. But it would be humane, it would adhere to the rule of law, and it would work.” Sonia Nazario is the author of Enrique’s Journey, is a graduate of Williams College and holds a master’s degree in Latin American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She received an…
This morning’s New York Times editorial page carried this article by Jennifer Finney Boylan of Banard College, Colombia University in which she quotes Jonathan Swift (1667-1745): “The greatest liar hath his believers: and it often happens, that if a lie be believed only for an hour, it hath done its work, and there is no…
“A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimension.” BACK
I’ve kept journals for decades, and recently while going through one nearly twenty years old, I came across this splinter from a forgotten sentence I’d jotted down, source unrecorded. There was only this penciled note: “I think from a newspaper article, or magazine article . . . an unexpected phrase of poetic beauty.” “. .…
We’re all familiar now with Mark Zuckerberg’s unceasing and hypocritical paen to the sacred interactions of loyal Face Book users, and how their interactions on his platform will make their lives so much better. Well, I recently came across the following tweet, it’s origin long-lost to repetition, that gives the lie to Zuck’s magnanimity: “‘Community’…
aph·o·rism [ˈafəˌrizəm] NOUN a pithy observation that contains a general truth, a statement of some general principle, expressed memorably by condensing much wisdom into few words. Examples: “The child is father to the man.” (William Wadsworth) “Power worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue.…
Years ago, in the spring of 1989, I was reading a new book I’d just bought by one of my favorite historians, Peter Brown, Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University, and scholar of Late Antiquity. I was reading, The Body and Society, Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, and I’d just begun…
Having written a number of novels involving characters with “dark personalities”, I found this article recently published in BigThink.com worth sharing. The sad reality is that people with high D-factor scores do not live in isolation. The damage they do to the people who interact with them reverberates widely and deeply. They can cause a…