To fight against a war or, better yet, and entire “war machine,” we had to become warriors ourselves. This is the cunning symmetry of war: Enemies tend to come to resemble one another. And this...

America is addicted to wars of distraction

There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?

The impasse was this: If I let myself speculate even tentatively about that something, if I acknowledged the possibility of a nonhuman agent or agents, some mysterious Other, intervening in my life, could I still...

The discovery of poverty at the beginning of the 1960s was something like the discovery of America almost 500 years earlier. In the case of these exotic terrains, plenty of people were on the site...

Take motherhood: nobody ever thought of putting it on a moral pedestal until some brash feminists pointed out, about a century ago, that the pay is lousy and the career ladder nonexistent.

The failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease.

Heads of state are notoriously ill prepared for their mature careers; think of Adolf Hitler (landscape painter), Ho Chi Minh (seaman), and our own Ronald Reagan.

I was raised the old-fashioned way, with a stern set of moral principles: Never lie, cheat, steal or knowingly spread a venereal disease. Never speed up to hit a pedestrian or, or course, stop to...

A child is not a salmon mousse. A child is a temporarily disabled and stunted version of a larger person, whom you will someday know. Your job is to help them overcome the disabilities associated...

There seems to be no stopping drug frenzy once it takes hold of a nation. What starts with an innocuous HUGS, NOT DRUGS bumper sticker soon leads to wild talk of shooting dealers and making...

My religious friends – and my friends were almost all Catholics or Protestants or occasionally something more exotic like Jewish or Greek Orthodox – were convinced that God had a “plan” for us, and since...

So why do people keep on watching? The answer, by now, should be perfectly obvious: we love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist. In fact, deep in their...

In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the...

What would it mean in practice to eliminate all the ‘negative people’ from one’s life? It might be a good move to separate from a chronically carping spouse, but it is not so easy to...

Those Romans who perpetrated the rape of the Sabines, for example, did not work themselves up for the deed by screening Debbie Does Dallas, and the monkish types who burned a million or so witches...

The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat...

Thus will the fondest dream of Phallic science be realized: a pristine new planet populated entirely by little boy clones of great scientific entrepreneurs free to smash atoms, accelerate particles, or, if they are so...

Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city, crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs, though, it’s intimate and psychological / resistant...

The conventional term is “mystical experience,” meaning something that by its very nature lies beyond the reach of language, except for some vague verbal hand-wavings about “mystery” and “transcendence.” As far as I was concerned...

Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.

There can be no more ancient and traditional American value than ignorance. English-only speakers brought it with them to this country three centuries ago, and they quickly imposed it on the Africans-who were not allowed...

In books, coaching sessions, and networking events aimed at the white-collar unemployed, the seeker soon encounters ideologies that are explicitly hostile to any larger, social understanding of his or her situation. The most blatant of...

If men were equally at risk from this condition — if they knew their bellies might swell as if they were suffering from end-stage cirrhosis, that they would have to go nearly a year without...

Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women’s liberation…none was more alarming than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men.

If that’s how it all started, then we might as well face the fact that what’s left out there is a great deal of shrapnel and a whole bunch of cinders (one of which is,...

We love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist

The Ten Commandments, for example, were no more challenging than the Girl Scout oath, and why should anyone be tempted to put one false god ahead of another?

Considering the absence of legal coercion, the surprising thing is that men have for so long, and, on the whole, so reliably, adhered to what we might call the ”breadwinner ethic.”

Personally, I can’t see why it would be any less romantic to find a husband in a nice four-color catalogue than in the average downtown bar at happy hour.

Just now and then, maybe every few weeks and then only for minutes at a time, a breach appeared in the partition and I walked on through, because I have always taken that as a...

Some of us still get all weepy when we think about the Gaia Hypothesis, the idea that earth is a big furry goddess-creature who resembles everybody’s mom in that she knows what’s best for us....

As a recent editorial in the Journal of Clinical Oncology put it: “What we must first remember is that the immune system is designed to detect foreign invaders, and avoid out own cells. With few...

Someone has to stand up for wimps.

From the point of view of the pharmaceutical industry, the AIDS problem has already been solved. After all, we already have a drug which can be sold at the incredible price of $8, 000 an...

In fact the “mask” theme has come up several times in my background reading. Richard Sennett, for example, in “The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism”, and Robert Jackall,...

I’m not a nice person.

The secret of the truly successful, I believe, is that they learned very early in life how not to be busy. They saw through that adage, repeated to me so often in childhood, that anything...