Featured Selections
From the Archives
Big Lies
Benjamin Carter Hett On What We Can Learn From Hitler’s Rise To Power
Hitler could only make angry arguments. Trump, too, can’t make an appeal to reason. All he can do is push the anger button and throw abuse at people. In a sense, he is just lucky that the one thing he can do is something that resonates with a certain segment of the population.
June 2019
Racing Toward The Future
[History] rushes on, as it always did, with two forces racing toward the future, one splendidly uniformed, the other ragged but inspired.
November 2019
excerpted from
Creating An Enlightened Society
The premise of Shambhala vision is that, in order to establish an enlightened society for others, we need to discover what inherently we have to offer the world.
November 2012The Bugs Of Childhood
Don’t you remember them, the furred legs / of a caterpillar moving along your arm, each follicle / prickling beneath their touch?
August 2013Why We Are All Addicted
I maintain that the essence of addiction is craving for an experience or object to make you feel all right. It’s the craving for something other than the self, even if that something is within the realm of the mind. Addiction is fundamentally human; it affects everybody.
July 1994The Man In The Control Booth
Wycke, I knew, had thought of his eyes as prisms, capable of seeing many points of view at once. They sat in deep dark sockets, alert, cautious, and ever vulnerable, like two small animals uneasy in their burrows.
September 1984Denial
How old is the habit of denial? We keep secrets from ourselves that all along we know. The public was told that old Dresden was bombed to destroy strategic railway lines. There were no railway lines in that part of the city. But it would be years before that story came to the surface.
October 1994The Art Of Aging
As you read this essay, you are aging. The older you get, the more you become an emissary from a vanished world — in my case, a world of black-and-white photographs taken by a Brownie camera, the sun bleaching the faces of the squinting subjects.
April 2017An Embarrassment Of Riches
Les Leopold On Forty Years Of Runaway Inequality
Our economy does not work for all of us. It works for a small handful of elites who are extracting as much wealth from it as they can.
May 2018
At The End Of The Fiscal Year
Ten months prior to being eligible for his company’s pension and benefit plan, after almost twenty years, Ben Ross was fired.
June 1982
