Against Bigness, Not Against Health Insurance
I believe in personal responsibility; insurance companies believe in impersonal responsibility.
The Writing on the Wall
The writing may still be on the wall, but a different story is being written in our block.
Life in the Cyborg Age: A Conversation with Josh Pauling
And Robin and I really hope that this book can be part of that movement to help people get outside the Machine, throw sand in its gears, and live as creatures—human beings, fully alive.
Black Friday, Affluenza, and the Election
Instead of appreciating the local and the staggering beauty of our God-given world, as FPR suggests we do, the good life requires million-dollar jaunts into outer space.
Away From Politics with Kathleen Raine (Then Back Again)
Are we capable of that on a scale that will regenerate our political life? Perhaps not, at least for now, but we can take heart from the knowledge that, over the long course of human events, peoples have built cities that embodied high civic ends.
Fighting Loneliness and Polarization with Chili
I am not sure if Garfield ever made chili for his supporters. The men and women who descended on his property were there to meet a future president. What Garfield understood, however, is that home is the best place to begin a movement.
The Very Online Culture Wars
The Very Online Right might be riding high now, but I anticipate that the election jackpot of the moment will not last and that this victory will soon look more like Las Vegas at noon, beaten down and tawdry under the merciless exposure of the midday western sun.
What is a Nation, Anyway?
Proper forgetting depends on the idea of a nation itself. For Renan, “a nation is a soul, a spiritual principle” built on two things, the past and the present.
Ode to Gettysburg at 161
To prove the American proposition, we must dedicate our lives to its truth with our deeds every day, and maybe someday with our lives themselves.
Familiar Revolution
Like the very young and the very old among us, we must forget the learned delusion of independence that revolution prefers and accept the radical dependence of the human condition.