When I say that George Eliot has long been my hero, I mean to include those aspects of her thought and temperament that have been disparaged or dismissed or ignored. She was, after all, a novelist who did not eschew politics or polemics - sometimes s...
London in the '70s was a pretty catastrophic dump, I can tell you. We had every kind of industrial trouble; we had severe energy problems; we were under constant terrorist attack from Irish terrorist groups who started a bombing campaign in English c...
Animals have come to mean so much in our lives. We live in a fragmented and disconnected culture. Politics are ugly, religion is struggling, technology is stressful, and the economy is unfortunate. What's one thing that we have in our lives that we c...
I had always been the theater nerd at Northwestern University. I knew I wanted to do acting, but I hated the idea of being this cliche - a girl from L.A. who decides to be an actress. I wanted more than that, and I had always loved politics, so I end...
Brazil go into every World Cup expecting to win - so when it is in Brazil, it is expected even more. You can't understand what the World Cup means to our country. Not just the fans and players, but everybody in Brazil lets us know that they expect it...
When the 2008 victory of Barack Obama and the defeat of grumpy old John McCain began looking, um, inevitable, I started fielding inquiries about whether 'Nixonland' - the name of the book I published that spring about the origins of the generation of...
Flipping the dial through available radio stations there will blare out to any listener an array of broadcasts, 24/7, propagating Religious Right politics, along with what they deem to be 'old-time gospel preaching.' This is especially true of what c...
You look at the pillars of the state: politics, the media, police, lawyers - they've all got their formal role, and then nestling above that is that power elite who are networked in through soft, social links, that are actually running the show. Why ...
I still wonder how policy officials... can sit down at the table with their families and have any appetite for food, or go to sleep at night, knowing that they failed to act. Human beings were sacrificed for political convenience. This would be enoug...
I enjoyed my upbringing, my siblings did, we're polite, we're respectful, but at the end of the day we're young, we like to have fun. But now, more so than ever, the youth has been vilified to the point where it feels like you can't enjoy being young...
There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact - in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself - of vastly mo...
A lifetime spent in the study of the history of societies since the dawn of mankind presumably inclined him to skepticism and misgivings in regard to any great scheme, religious or political, that set out to create universal happiness in one fell swo...
Historians are not scientists. They cannot (and should not even trying to) establish universal laws of social or political "physics" with reliable predictive powers. Why? Because there is no possibility of repeating the single, multi-millennium exper...
There are few genuine conservatives within the U.S. political system, and it is a sign of the intellectual corruption of the age that the honorable term 'conservatism' can be appropriated to disguise the advocacy of a powerful, lawless, aggressive an...
The politics of trans-identity seeks to move from the _politics of singular identity_ to the _politics of multiple solidarities_ across various identities without abandoning one's personal attachments and commitments to the group that one finds signi...
I believe _cosmopolitanism_ can be an effective discourse with which to advocate a politics of _transidentity_ of overlapping interests and heterogeneous or hybrid subjects in order to challenge conventional notions of exclusive belonging, identity a...
He had an AM radio playing a conservative talk show. The host was making some very interesting statements about the president. I don't usually pay much attention to politics, but from what the man said, I had to believe that sometime in the recent pa...
But, Jefferson worried that the people - and the argument goes back to Thucydides and Aristotle - are easily misled. He also stressed, passionately and repeatedly, that it was essential for the people to understand the risks and benefits of governmen...
And if I am further pressed to declare straightforwardly whether I mean to disparage these authorities [who criticize Ibsen], I reply, pointedly, that I do. I affirm that such criticisms are written by men who know as much of political life as I know...
It can be coins or sports or politics or horses or music or faith... the saddest people I've ever met in life are the ones who don't care deeply about anything at all. Passion and satisfaction go hand in hand, and without them, any happiness is only ...
John shrugged. "It always seemed silly to me to desire a woman who cannot converse any better than a sheep." Belle leaned forward, her eyes glittering mischievously. "Really? I would have thought you'd prefer such a woman,considering your difficulty ...
