Columns

Some hot afternoons when the battlefield of the news is filled with butt ends of breaking follies, you can hear flies buzzing all over American political culture. Swarms of gnats teeming with Trumpian hubris drive many of us to silly states of raging impotence or whimpering escapism. It truly is the chaos of bedlam. Some […]

Some well-educated and thoughtful friends of mine are so offended by President Trump and his cronyocracy that they say our system of government is broken beyond repair. The graft, corruption, news twisting, propaganda, the president’s seeming imperviousness to the rule of law and his administration’s environmental atrocities and abysmally inhumane immigration policies have made our […]

I. THE CHACO WAY Giving his life its head, mind riding thermals over the cliffs where nothing ever goes wrong, the perfectly what is detects him like raven’s shadow fast across a ridge. Fear thins out. Nacre skin, fossil Aphrodite’s perfect blush appears so touchable her knees smooth into stone, and he hears himself say […]

In a world of climate extremes, when there’s nothing left to do, you adapt or go extinct. For humans, adaptation is about being mentally and culturally agile, about thinking clearly and acting cooperatively. The way for us in our communities to survive the roulette of climate change disaster is to partner up and think clearly […]

Philosophy and the philosophy of science supply us, as residents of a climate changed and climate changing world, with four key ideas to help us make the most of an increasingly terrible situation and to help us try to avoid contributing to an even more dreadful one in the future. The four ideas are “Pascal’s […]

I’ve had a number of students and young friends over the years tell me that voting didn’t matter to them, that it seems a futile exercise and an inconsequential bother they just couldn’t buy into. Their remarks have always flummoxed me, and my response has never seemed adequate. And, indeed, when one sees politics through […]

Sometimes current history requires that we reexamine our fundamental beliefs and understand in new ways why we feel the way we do. For me, in these hate-filled times, it seems clearer than ever that any kind of prejudice — from racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, to ageism, religious prejudice, and all cultural and tribal hatreds […]