Debates

PREFATORY NOTE

A few years ago I wrote a series of short lyrical mediations about objects that appeared in a collection called The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday …
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THE WORLD TODAY appears divided into two opposing camps: the realm of Good and the empire of Evil, the free world against the world of slavery, “crusaders” vs. “martyrs.” Yet, …
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THERE ARE THOSE EXCEPTIONAL INSTANCES, in which a date or a place stands for a particular event that happened then and there. “9/11” and “Chernobyl” symbolize in a recognizable shorthand …
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SOCIAL MEDIA SUCH AS FACEBOOK, Snapchat, and Tinder were invented as part of a culture that objectifies and denigrates girls and women. It is well known that the Facebook founder …
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WE SEEK FREEDOM. Is this not the rallying cry of American democracy, endlessly repeated, endlessly intoned as its most durable credo? We seek freedom to do as we want without …
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THE BODY IS NOTHING but the outside: skin exposed, a network of sentient receivers and transmitters. All outside and nothing like “me” that would be held inside that wrapping. There …
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EVERYTHING THAT PRECEDED the announcement of a referendum on whether the United Kingdom should remain in the European Union was a political absurdity — demagoguery, irresponsibility, shameful concessions ­— with …
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A MONTH HAS PASSED since U.S. President Barack Obama held a press conference on February 23, 2016 to announce the plan for the “once and for all” closure of the …
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QUITE UNEXPECTEDLY, a whole slew of philosophical — I would even say “metaphysical” — issues have come up on the Republican side of the primaries this election season. How to …
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JUST THE NUMBERS are terrible. More Americans have been killed by a gun since 1970 than in all the wars America has fought since the American Revolution: roughly 1.5 million …
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