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11 May

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized

“The Joe Biden Thing” hit full force after my last week’s blog had posted—but waiting is not necessarily bad in such circumstances. It offered an opportunity to cool down from volcanic levels, try to think calmly, read and listen to different opinions, and do...

04 May

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized
Unintended consequences of an action or event are inherently shocking. They do sometimes offer hints, warnings, clues so subtle as to make sense only after the fact. But mostly they can’t be predicted–unless they were so obvious they could have been predicted, so naturally were ignored.

27 Apr

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized
It's acknowledged by many now that the women who constitute only 7 percent of world leaders did a notably different and excellent job of preparing their countries for the coronavirus pandemic and of coping with it as the full force has hit.

20 Apr

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized

Awestruck, people in the northern Indian state of Punjab stare at the sight of the grand Himalayan mountain range, now, after half a century, again visible for more than 100 miles. Why? The reduction in air pollution caused by the national lockdown to contain the...

13 Apr

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized
Suffering is not a competition. The pandemic bestows trauma and tragedy on everyone. Yet it's also true that catastrophic events expose societal fault lines. In the USA, the 2020 plague is crushing some far more cruelly than others. The poor. People of color. Old people. Disabled people. Female people.

06 Apr

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized
In the days immediately following 9/11, I wrote three descriptive email dispatches to friends. They shared them, and the dispatches wound up going around the world, garnering the name Letters from Ground Zero. Then, in 2012, when Hurricane Sandy devastated the New York area, I wrote Letter from Ground Zero IV. This is Letter from Ground Zero V.

30 Mar

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized
A year ago this planet's population got our first vision of a black hole. Now it feels as if we’re in one. We need a comfort zone. Somewhere.

09 Mar

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized
How many times does black America have to step up and save the republic it built? African Americans did it again on Super Tuesday. They did it with a vote that was unequivocal, pragmatic, and politically sophisticated.