Could everybody please stop for a minute and take a breath?
A milestone has been reached, one we might best commemorate by a collective inhalation, sending a little oxygen to the national forebrain, which seems to be suffering the symptoms of acute deprivation.
The scapegoating of Shirley Sherrod, the Agriculture Department official who was forced to resign [...]

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“The personal is political.” If you were sentient in the sixties and seventies, you heard it almost daily. No doubt, you also said it now and then. It still echoes occasionally around the Zeitgeist, but with a less commanding tone.
It’s been a little over a year since I left a decades-long marriage, and I am [...]

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So many of us want to make things better: the world, our lives, the lives of others. Some are driven by a vision; if not the lion and lamb cuddling up together, at least a greater harmony and wholeness. My generation of thinkers and activists is swathed in that desire. Looking back, I see this [...]

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I’m heading home tomorrow, after being on the road for a couple of weeks, during which Arizona’s new and frightening anti-immigrant legislation was being passed, triggering vast and vastly appalled protest. I am glad to see from news photos that the scope of May Day protests exceeded expectations, but the photos also seem to say [...]

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Passover starts tonight, the great celebration of liberation from bondage, both literal and figurative. For the first seder—the ritual meal of symbolic foods that accompanies the retelling of the Exodus from Egypt—I will be with friends whose lives are dedicated to progressive politics. I expect that in the telling, there will be many parallels between [...]

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By now, I have tried out approximately one gazillion concepts, arguments and images intended to convey my passion for art’s public purpose. Some have great persuasive power and some, despite my deep conviction of their merit, don’t quite get over.
Sometimes, these are like beloved children who learn to walk or talk behind schedule: you just [...]

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My ancestors were nomads and refugees, and I have carried on that tradition. Sometimes I think I was born packed and ready to go. I no longer speak the language of infants, so I can’t quote my exact thoughts, but I have the distinct impression that the synapses that fired when I first opened my [...]

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In ordinary conversation, beauty can be an answer: what nourishes the spirit, kindles desire, soothes the heart? But in the more self-referential realms of the art world, it is a question. Critics and curators ask if “mere beauty” is a mask for deeper truth. Does it snag the eye, diverting attention from the true essence [...]

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