Latest work
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Ground zeroed
Read more: Ground zeroedCathedral Commons: The familiar shape of things to come. Where I once ate beef-burgers with my father is now a great crater of spooned-out earth lorded over by a crane that local builders nonchalantly label a “mass excavation.” In 1960s, in what is now the excavation, soda counter attendants, most…
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Them’ again
Read more: Them’ againEgypt’s escalating violence is in part the product of a long-held belief in conspiracies. Egypt’s deepening turmoil is based on intimations of conspiracy; a passionately unshakable southern Mediterranean way of thinking in which scheming puppet-masters are seen to preordain most social and political outcomes to suit their immediate whims. The…
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Venus and Mars
Read more: Venus and MarsObama and Putin at the G8 meeting in June 2013: Little joy. No two major power leaders, the merits and demerits of their respective political systems aside, are as different as Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin. Obama is ambitious, serious, even vaguely fatalistic, a highly educated political technocrat reluctant to…
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Incidentally racist
Read more: Incidentally racistRace played little role in the interaction between black World War II troops and their allies, and adversaries. In World War II, numbers of Buffalo Soldiers — black American infantry — served in both north and south Italy. By all accounts they were treated with dignity. Race may have been…
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Is true!
Read more: Is true!We truck? No. We car? No. We computer? No. The Croatian National Truckers Union, the acclaimed English-language watchdog body, recently issued its 2013 “Is Bad Transmission, No?” report, which annually highlights dubious English-language usage in both speech and writing. “Family to which words belong like boy and girl with feeling,”…
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Honor among thieves
Read more: Honor among thievesDaniel Ellsberg on trial in Los Angeles in 1973. The behavior of conscience-driven whistleblowers can explain the way responsibility is perceived at any given time. Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden are cases in point. In the late 1960s, summa cum laude Harvard graduate Ellsberg, a former Marine, rejoined a team…
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