Back in the Sixties, segregationists opposed to the impending Civil Rights Act of 1964 were fond of saying “you can’t legislate morality.” By which they meant that morality is a bottom-up enterprise, an ultimately spiritual, individualistic goal, and not one that can be imposed from the top down. All of which was then and is … Continue reading On Legislating Morality

Joni Mitchell's hugely influential album "Blue" turned 50 last week, and fitting tribute was paid in a compendium of artists' appreciations in the New York Times, which includes some wonderful photographs like the one here. By way of honoring the anniversary of "Blue," my own tribute to Joni, first posted here in 2017, is reproduced … Continue reading Joni Mitchell, “Blue,” and Me

Proust had his madeleines. For my daughter, it’s oysters. We’d gathered our portion of our extended family — her and her husband and two little boys, my wife and me — on an island in Florida for a post-pandemic reunion, and were out to dinner. With our usual alacrity we agreed we needed a dozen … Continue reading A Memory of Oysters

[Originally posted in June, 2019, and re-posted in light of the Supreme Court's granting review earlier this month in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which challenges the constitutionality of a Mississippi law effectively barring abortions after the fifteenth week of pregnancy.] Of the many ramifications of the election of Donald Trump, perhaps … Continue reading The Last Days of Roe v. Wade

Congressional redistricting is one of those seemingly boring, deeply political processes that happens infrequently enough that we can be forgiven for ignoring it. It’s easy to see that how a congressional district is defined geographically will influence who wins elections in it, and that the manipulation of district boundaries is potentially anti-democratic. But when we … Continue reading Attack of the Duck District: Gerrymandering America

President Biden last week announced the formation of a bipartisan commission to study various reforms to the Supreme Court. Chief among the possibilities, and seized upon by conservatives as the entire reason for the exercise, is the idea of increasing the number of justices to twelve or even fifteen, pejoratively referred to as “packing” the … Continue reading How to Reform the Supreme Court

When I was growing up, my family and I were American Bedouins, briefly rooted, then moving on. We were children and I suspect our parents were too, though to us they were gods who determined our fate. In their first fourteen years of marriage they would have ten different homes. My father was a salesman … Continue reading The Longest Home

Hypocrisy is commonplace in our politics, but usually politicians attempt to maintain at least the appearance of logical consistency between their public pronouncements and their cherished ideological positions. Not so Mitch McConnell, who issued a statement yesterday decrying the fact that several corporations, along with Major League Baseball, have taken action or commented negatively on Georgia’s new, … Continue reading McConnell’s “Parallel Government”

We’re beginning to see glimmerings of that elusive light at the end of the tunnel. Biden’s rescue package got passed, the vaccines are trickling down to more and more age groups and risk categories, and we can just barely foresee the day when we’ll be able to get together over dinner indoors, or see the … Continue reading Post-Pandemic Derangement Syndrome

It’s rare that two problems add up to a solution. But that could be the case with two problems that have been thrown into high relief by the Covid pandemic. One is the crisis in higher education brought on by changing demographics and widespread questioning of the value proposition of higher ed as defined by … Continue reading A Modest Proposal to Save Higher Ed