Charlottesville. It now takes its place with other iconic names in the history of American social movements, such as Selma, Stonewall, Kent State and Berkeley. Weeks after the event, the story continues to consume us, even spilling into sportscasts,...
We are roughly at the half-year mark of President Donald Trump’s administration. I am quite sure that if one did a content analysis of mainstream news media reporting on American politics since January, one would find an overwhelming percentage of coverage...
O.J. is free again.As a society we seem to tolerate and even encourage bad behavior. Our major institutions, such as public schools and government, do not do a very effective job of using rewards to incentivize good behavior and punishments to dis-incentivize...
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” — W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming,” 1919“The upright path is the middle path of all the qualities known to man. This is the path which is equally distant from...
When the British people voted last June to leave the European Union, it was as shocking an outcome as the U.S. presidential election in November. On March 29, British Prime Minister Theresa May formally began the difficult process of negotiating Britain’s...
Richard Hofstadter’s famous 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” long has been associated with the threat posed by the far right. However, Hofstadter started the essay by writing that “American politics has often been an arena...
Is President Donald Trump a bigot, as many of his detractors claim? He surely has many flaws, some of which I often have written about — for example, his careless, even reckless, unpresidential tweets. But I doubt bigotry is one of them, at least based...
In the words on the cover of the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, it is now “Trump Time.” What are we to make of Donald Trump’s foreign policy, beyond the early tumult over refugees and other issues? What might it look like over the next four years?It...
It is the time of year for making New Year’s resolutions. I resolve to continue to struggle to be as colorblind as possible. What does this mean? It commits me to the following:First, I will ignore those who believe that we cannot and should not be...
By now, you probably have heard of Hampshire College in Massachusetts lowering the American flag to half-mast after Donald Trump’s election. In the same spirit, other colleges offered expanded grief counseling services, anticipating an unusually heavy...
We are all still recovering from the shock of the 2016 presidential election. Virtually nobody, including the leading political scientists in the country, predicted the outcome that saw Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton. We are left with deciphering...
In June, the Jewish Light reported the startling news that Israel had just been elected to chair the United Nations Legal Committee, the first time Israel was selected to head a U.N. permanent committee. Perhaps it is time to take another look at an...
