Recently, a Facebook friend shared a quote attributed to — but not proven to be — by Mark Twain: “Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.”  I wrote back that I could make neither heads nor tails of this

Some mornings I awake with a deep sense of guilt.  The lives of people I have never met are being torn apart by war, their homes bombed, their families separated and many of them killed.  Each day the question for them isn’t what movie to see or book to read.  The question is how

Elizabeth Lunbeck’s new book The Americanization of Narcissism, explores the fault line between healthy and unhealthy narcissism.  (Me, Myself, and ID,” by Laura Kipnis, Harper’s Magazine, pgs. 80)  In it she explores the question of narcissism’s origin.  Is it nurtured by

I’ve often wondered why our form of democracy is so difficult to transplant in Africa and the Middle East.  One reason might be because of our diversity.  We began as a nation of differing cultures rather than a homogenous one.  To get along we had to build a tent large enough to

When we read about the high wages earned by CEOs of corporations the justification is always the same.  Those high salaries are necessary to attract and keep good management.  But doesn’t the same logic apply to workers?  Aren’t good wages and good benefits part of keeping empl

Several years ago, I read a medical expert’s analysis of James Joyce’s Ulysses.  He concluded that the book exhibited not genius but the workings of a diseased mind.  If the doctor’s theory had been  treated seriously, a number of  literary critics and scholars who claim to

While the world rejoices in Pope Francis’ vow to return the Church to its mission of mercy for the poor and the weak, writer Mary Gordon points out he continues to keep American nuns in the critical spotlight for doing just that instead of taking a stand against abortion, homosexual

When I graduated from college my first job interviewer looked at me askance.  “What can you do with a philosophy degree?” he asked.  “Think,” I replied.   I didn’t get the job but never regretted my liberal arts education.  As William Deresiewicz  wrote in a recent ess

Recently, I deplored the way Twitter symbols had infiltrated our language.  (Blog 8/26/14)    But I was an innocent.  I’d no idea how emojis, those little symbols used to clarify an electronic messages, had exploded into a complete language seen not only on social networks but

The face of the migrant worker is no longer solely that of the Latino or the undereducated.  It’s the face of the elderly who were caught in the tsunami of the 2008-09 Great Recession.  They are school teachers, white collar executives, or couples with  nest eggs that were demoli