In January, Joe Biden assumed the leadership of a nation in disarray. On Donald Trump’s watch, the US had struggled for nearly a year to come to terms with a pandemic that disrupted not just the economy, but people’s lives and relationships. Last summer, an unprecedented protest movement...
Here’s the strange thing in an ever-stranger world: I was born in July 1944 in the midst of a devastating world war. That war ended in August 1945 with the atomic obliteration of two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by the most devastating bombs in history up to that...
America has just concluded a cataclysmic Election Day and its immediate aftermath. What was supposed to be our quadrennial celebration of democratic institutions is instead a reflection of what happens when unprincipled and corrupt leaders are given access to the national stage to promote...
The immense success of Robin DiAngelo’s book, “White Fragility,” reveals a secret that American publishers have been waiting for decades to unearth. Book titles are important. Publishers spend time searching for the title that will turn a promising book into the next explosive No. 1...
There seemed to be a lot more bright stars in the sky in recent weeks, even over Washington, DC. Then suddenly, as national “leaders” slept wrapped in a bubble of delusion while disease was taking its ghastly toll, a black man in Minneapolis, Minnesota, pleaded for another breath to the...
On March 16, French President Emmanuel Macron was the first head of state to declare war in the battle against the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. In a televised address to the French nation, he repeated the phrase “we are at war” as obsessively as Cato the Elder more than two...
Another weekend and another spate of terrorist shootings in America carried out by young men motivated by hatred toward people who are ostensibly different to them, to such an extent that they are willing to kill people in mass shootings. In the rush to come to an understanding as to why these...
It is surely no secret that a significant portion of the American electorate hopes that the national nightmare of the Trump administration will begin to end in November 2020. Beyond hoping, many have been moved to activism and active resistance. Not enough, but many. While there is not yet a...
Can “opportunity zones” lift struggling towns? Singer John Legend joined experts to discuss this tax incentive at a University of Pennsylvania Law School conference. The $1.5 trillion Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, signed into law in December 2017, was the subject of heated debate about who mainly...
In the US, even unpaid time is money for those who have an unlimited supply. The way public figures talk about the problems of ordinary people has the merit of revealing the inner workings and culture of the dominant ideological system. We have seen an example of it in Emmanuel Macron’s...
