Tagged “humanity”


I Am White

The Associated Press has decided to capitalize Black.  They are finally acknowledging that “the lowercase black is a color, not a person.” But the change is not only practical, it’s political, based on “the need to be inclusive and respectful in our storytelling and the evolution of language.” I made my own decision sometime back to capitalize Black for the strictly practical... Read More

Posted on August 3, 2020 at 10:41 pm under Life & Culture

I Don’t Want Trump Impeached

What I want for Trump is much simpler than impeachment: I want to see his approval rating fall to the low twenties, then to the teens. The low teens. I want to see him repudiated by America, and especially by the nearly half of voting Americans who thought, despite all evidence to the contrary, that he would be a suitable president. Is that too much to ask? I know there’s an intransigent... Read More

Posted on November 2, 2017 at 11:40 am under Life & Culture

The Call

It was confirmed yesterday: we live in one of those neighborhoods where neighbors—grown, adult neighbors—get into fistfights. Perhaps it was a once-in-a-decade event, but it has somewhat darkened my view of the neighborhood. Particularly after Bellevue. Peaceful Bellevue. There, people didn’t attack one another in the street. A fight was the neighbor looking the other way when you said hi.... Read More

Posted on July 21, 2017 at 8:22 am under Life & Culture

My Imperfect Relationship with the Truth

“The last common grandmother of humans and chimpanzees lived six million years ago.” I like that statement, and I believe it. Don’t we all believe things we like, things we want to believe? I like the idea that I’m closely related to chimpanzees. It reinforces my worldview, my makeshift model of the world where I live. That worldview is constructed one found object at a time with no... Read More

Posted on June 8, 2017 at 11:16 am under Life & Culture

You Can’t Not Say Something

I recently had a major misunderstanding with a client about what it meant to be objective. The project was somewhat controversial, perhaps more controversial than it should have been. It was an exhibit about the problem of violence, and it dealt primarily with historical accounts of violence. Going in, we all agreed that human violence was a bad thing, but we thought the exhibit required that we... Read More

Posted on March 11, 2017 at 1:42 pm under Words & Music

Who Goes Nazi?

I recently came across Dorothy Thompson’s 1941 Harper’s piece, “Who Goes Nazi?” In it she describes a party game in which you look around the room and decide who at the party would embrace Nazism in America. Thompson had been a correspondent in Germany during the 1920s and 30s before being expelled by the Nazis, so she was in a good position to make the call. In the article she plays out... Read More

Posted on February 28, 2017 at 5:47 pm under Life & Culture

Civil Discourse

Facebook post to a “political discussion group” a week or two into Trump’s presidency: “Hey, I’ve been checking in occasionally without participating, but I have a question. What do you think about President Trump’s constant lying? Is it important or unimportant? We’ve seen him lie about a number of small things this week, but do you think he will also lie about bigger things?... Read More

Posted on February 27, 2017 at 8:54 am under Life & Culture

The Greatest Generation

I came across this while researching the War in the Pacific: “Some journalists were visiting a Japanese school. During a chat with one class of youngsters, a journalist asked about the war between Japan and the U.S. One student asked, ‘The United States and Japan were in a war?’ Yes, the journalist replied, to which the student asked, ‘Who won?’” There are many ways to interpret... Read More

Posted on February 23, 2013 at 9:20 pm under Life & Culture