Here is my all-time favorite cartoon: a man is hanging from his pickax, which is hooked, barely, over the top edge of an impossible precipice. A second man hangs on to his ankle. There is…
Posts published in “Essays”
The best season of the year is finally here. Baseball season. It's only a game that's being played, of course — but a game that can be very serious business to the young people who…
Although he wasn’t at all street-smart or jail-savvy when he was arrested for civil disobedience in the 1960s, Tom Cahill got a quick lesson in incarceration as he was led to his Texas jail cell…
While attending an antiwar rally in Seattle on Saturday, March 19, I had profoundly mixed feelings. From an organizer's standpoint, the rally was a success: 5,000 people came out in the rain to hear speeches…
Some of what Harvard President Larry Summers said about scientific and mathematical aptitudes was sensible enough. And some of it was the kind of bosh you can expect from an economist, as Mr. Summers is.…
Jeff Weise, teen slayer of 10 including himself at the Redlake Indian reservation in northern Minnesota, was on Prozac, prescribed by some doc. How did the consultation go? “Here Jeff, take these, they may help…
“A theater of the absurd.” This is how Rep. Tom Lantos described Thursday’s “steroid hearings” on Capital Hill. The description is apt. Viewers, as CSPAN and ESPN joined forces, witnessed hearings as pointless as they…
My son has returned from the war. After a year in Iraq, he’s come back to his wife and the rest of us unharmed in body. I don’t know about his spirit. Soldiers must see…
At UC-Berkeley in the mid-60s the issue was survival for if a student movement couldn’t speak, petition, hawk literature, and take contributions on University turf, it couldn’t exist. We might not have been good at…