In true old school blog style, you will have to read this post backwards, as the most recent entries will be at the top. This may cause you to want to go straight to the original, published throughout the day of November 7 2018 at Public Seminar. 10:23 p.m. NBC projects that Democrats will take the … More Election Day, 2018
In this essay, I reflected on the damage that the GOP-led Senate Judiciary Committee has done to democracy, in its insistence that as damaged a candidate as Brett Kavanaugh be confirmed. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last Thursday, and Brett Kavanaugh’s unhinged response to her charges, was an epic installment of … More Post-Kavanaugh Stress Disorder
On this July 4 I am in Poland, where President Andrzej Duda has just decapitated the judiciary, and Poles are, as I write, in the streets to protest the continuing theft of their democracy. Perhaps because of this, a stirring performance of Krzysztof Penderecki’s “Polish Requiem” I attended at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Kraków last night, a … More We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident
Although I love to travel, I’ve never liked crossing borders. It makes me nervous, perhaps because, on one side of my family, I am the child of immigrants who were always fussing about their paperwork. Border guards, I learned at an early age, are anonymous functionaries who have outsized power to wreck your plans, or … More The U.S. Border Crisis is Not the Holocaust
At Public Seminar we are feminists, so we don’t raise our daughters to be princesses. We are open-minded leftists, so we don’t fawn over the ruling classes, but we don’t long to guillotine them either. And we are anti-racists, so we haven’t declared an end to racism worldwide just because a multi-racial American TV star has married … More Royal Wedding Roundup
7:41 AM: Remember I said never to miss morning prayers at CPAC? People I missed yesterday by being late and leaving early: Wayne LaPierre, Mike Pence and Eric Trump. As I publish today, if you are a general ticket holder, it’s already standing room only, an hour before the pledge to God and country. If you followed my live blog or my … More LIVE from #CPAC2018, Day 2
This post was originally published by Eurozine on January 26, 2018 as part of an international forum on the #MeToo movement. Back in the 1970s, radical feminists in the United States like Susan Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, women who theorized rape and sexual harassment, had a valuable message: it wasn’t about sex, but about power. … More A lot of things are broken
This post was originally published at Public Seminar on January 24, 2018. Dear Frank Bruni, You and I have a lot in common. We are both gay. We are both white. We are both card-carrying members of the well-educated, Northeastern, liberal elite. We both voted for Hillary Clinton (OK, my politics are to the left … More Is Football a Metaphor for Political Culture?
