We always look at the 'Fortune 500,' and we say, men in power, but we don't look at the glass cellar as opposed to the glass ceiling and say, men also are the homeless, men are also the ones that are the garbage collectors. Men are also the ones dyin...
Harriet loved her new persona. As Maxine, she was courageous and accomplished, a woman of sophistication equally at home in Cannes or on the Indian subcontinent. As Maxine she didn't walk, she strode; she did not merely see, but beheld. The very air ...
We have become a society that can't self-correct, that can't address its obvious problems, that can't pull out of its nosedive. And so to our list of disasters let us add this fourth entry: we have entered an age of folly that - for all our Facebooki...
The fracking revolution kicks off two additional mini-revolutions in energy: the accelerated shift to natural gas-powered vehicles, reducing the oil demand even further, and the displacement of coal in electricity generation frees up the cleanest and...
Here's my favorite bonehead concept from the 1990s in the Pentagon: the theory of anti-access, area-denial asymmetrical strategies. Why do we call it that? Because it's got all those A's lined up I guess. This is gobbledygook for 'If the United State...
Growing up in Britain as a rather loose Jew, the two things that didn't belong together were freedom and religious intensity. In America, they do. The Founding Fathers made a bet that if you didn't force everyone to profess religion in their own part...
My mother had heard the story of Hannah and Samuel, so she prayed that if God would give her a son, she would give that son to God. That was a perfectly appropriate thing for her to do, but as I observe, she did not have to tell me she had made such ...
Back when I was 16, when I should have been doing normal high school things, I availed myself of my brand new driver's license to spend as much time as possible in Milwaukee's Renaissance Book Shop, a tumbledown five-story warehouse that the city was...
Mickey: Why all of a sudden is the sketch dirty? Ed Smythe: Child molestation is a touchy subject, and the affiliates... Mickey: Read the papers, half the country's doing it! Ed Smythe: Yes, but you name names. Mickey: We never-we don't name names, w...
Gail: Two months ago, you thought you had a malignant melanoma. Mickey: Naturally, I, I- Do you know I- The sudden appearance of a black spot on my back! Gail: It was on your shirt! Mickey: I- How was I to know? Everyone was pointing back here.
There is no battle space the U.S. Military cannot access. They said we couldn't do Afghanistan. We did it with ease. They said we couldn't do Iraq. We did it with 150 combat casualties in six weeks. We did it so fast we weren't prepared for their col...
Dictatorships usually exist primarily because of the internal power distribution in the home country. The population and society are too weak to cause the dictatorship serious problems, wealth and power are concentrated in too few hands. Although dic...
Further, democratic negotiators, or foreign negotiation specialists accepted to assist in the negotiations, may in a single stroke provide the dictators with the domestic and international legitimacy that they had been previously denied because of th...
I fear that much of the Christianity that surrounds us assumes our task is to save appearances by protecting God from Job-like anguish. But if God is the God of Jesus Christ, then God does not need our protection. What God demands is not protection, ...
Oh God, this is my fantasy! Where those just-friend boys suddenly realize they love me.' 'I don't know if this was like .' 'What happened?' He thought for a moment. 'Well. I realized I loved her.' Hannah gasped. 'Oh God, that's so sweet.
The petite bourgeoise and small property in general represent a precious zone of autonomy and freedom in state systems increasingly dominated by large public and private bureaucracies.
As a kid, I was growing up in an era of celebration of the Civil War centennial, with a lot of 'Lost Cause' emphasis on the Confederacy. I used to play Civil War soldiers with my brothers as a child, and my older brother always insisted that he got t...
Frederick: I'm not interested in what your interior decorator thinks, okay? Dusty: I can't commit to anything without consulting her first. That's what I have her for, okay? Frederick: This is degrading. You don't buy paintings to blend in with the s...
At the Nuremberg trials, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt described the actions and the architects of the Holocaust with a simple, memorable phase--saying that the whole lot represented 'the banality of evil.' Her long ago words applied well t...
Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have...
Why did we divorce? I guess you could say we had trouble synchronizing. You know that carnival ride where two cages swing in opposite directions, going higher and higher until they go over the top? That was us. We passed each other all the time, but ...
