America has always had reactionaries, people highly resistant to cultural change and determined to undermine the forces underlying such change. Such reactionaries currently appear under a variety of names: social conservative, pro-family, traditional values voter, new right, and now, anti-woke. What they all have in... Continue
Public Citizen
I loved science fiction movies and books as a kid; I still do, although I don’t read much sci-fi these days. In 1958, at camp Androscoggin in Maine, Earth vs. Flying Saucers was shown one movie night, and visions of a disabled saucer crashing into... Continue
We live in an affirmative universe, the Universe of Yes. The presence of matter is itself evidence, as are all the other forces and fields we’ve discovered. The universe only says “yes,” even to our ability to say “no.” It doesn’t get more affirmative than... Continue
Anyone who knows me knows that I’m an avid walker. I cross Broadway every day, sometimes several times as I go about my errands and appointments. Being a pedestrian crossing Broadway is not a casual event; I make eye contact with drivers to make sure... Continue
From the smallest animal to the largest, hunger, the first and strongest drive to assert itself, underlies the substance of animal behavior. Sensory functions - smell, sight, touch, hearing and taste - all support the search for food, and their humble origins may well lie... Continue
Truth can be elusive, so much so that the entirety of the scientific method may be seen as a systematic attempt to find it. Our scientific age, roughly 300 years old, was preceded by uncountable eons of magical thinking and mythology, variously employed to explain... Continue
Neither of my parents were observant Jews. Yes, we belonged to a reform temple and would attend services there for the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, but other than that, we were mostly Jews in name only. We ate bagels, cream... Continue
Walking seems such a simple thing. I used to think nothing of jumping up and heading out of the house when I was a boy; following the impulse to move felt seamless, an act so natural as to be thoughtless. My father Norman was a... Continue
The world is turned upside down; global warming, international relations, pandemic disease, and regional politics have all gone nuts. Appreciation of norms, the behavioral and social customs that preserve comity and decorum, is not in decline; it’s collapsed. Trump and his minions are not the... Continue
We may be living in the digital age, but many of us grew up when the world was only analog, which means we possess many generations of family photographs. I’m talking about photographic prints, many of them black and white, filling envelopes and storage boxes... Continue