Columns

In the wake of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) dire predictions earlier this month, a New York Times editorial by Auden Schendler and Andrew P. Jones had this headline: “Stopping Climate Change Is Hopeless. Let’s Do It.” The IPCC had given the people of our planet a mere dozen years, until 2030, […]

Listening to Associate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s opening remarks at his Senate confirmation hearing two weeks ago, I heard a roar of vitriol toward liberals, Democrats and “the Clintons” that reminded me of a book by Anne Coulter, arch liberal hater and basher, a rage-intoxicated screed of Rush Limbaugh, or a time-lapse explosion of […]

Kavanaugh, Trump, and the Republican Congress are finally on the verge of doing what right wingers and centrist Democrats have been trying to do for decades — crush the values and achievements of American liberalism, especially as it expressed itself in the counterculture in the United States in the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s. If there […]

When members of the United Nations laugh at the President of the United States, not at a joke, but at a preposterous ascertain of being “the best,” you can viscerally feel what the rest of the world really thinks about American exceptionalism and about Trumpian exceptionalism. When Judge Brett Kavanaugh and Senate GOP misogynists claim […]

American government and politics look more and more like the three-layer structure of the internet as described in the September AARP Bulletin out last week. That’s part of the reason why it is increasingly difficult for citizens to understand what their government is doing. Most of us live in a distracted vacuum dominated much of […]

Memoirs of the great gifts : the miracles of kindness, geode midnights: the universe a cave of stars securely filled with Eros, photosynthesis, the unimaginable delight of light, of warmth of any kind, body peace, dawn thrill, sweet death when you need it. Miracles of kindness, of someone knowing what you need to hear and […]

It’s still amazing to me after all these years how the vast amusement park of the news can distract us so thoroughly from the most intimate life and death matters. Even when you say it directly — we are more interested in the freak shows of Trumpian politics than we are in the purity of […]