After Reading a 2002 Book by Arundhati Roy
What is happening to our world is almost too colossal for human comprehension to contain. But it is a terrible, terrible thing. To contemplate its girth and circumference, to attempt to define it, to try…
Category: Activists
Don’t Expect Applause
Tom Hayden was a major player in the antiwar movement of the 1960s as well as a familiar liberal and progressive activist, commentator, and researcher since. His last book is entitled, Hell No: The Forgotten…
A Beautiful Kaddish by Andrew Wimmer
I was writing in my Naikan notebook this morning, reflecting on some of what I’ve received from Andrew Wimmer. I remembered his “review” of The Book of Mev, and am happy to share it here……
Share the Wealth
Lynda Nana Gyedua Oppong shares a fact each Humanities class.
Gita/Gandhi
Not agitated By grief nor hankering after pleasure, They livs free from lust and fear and anger. Fettered no more by selfish attachments, They are not elated by good fortune Nor depressed by bad. Such…
Imagining Dubya Writing Barack
I came across the following when browsing Ralph Nader’s book, Return to Sender: Unanswered Letters to the President, 2001-2015. Ralph is not holding his breath that Obama’s successor will be any different. After nearly…
What I Can Use: Notes on Waldman and Birman’s Civil Disobediences
“Emerson was not a systematic reader, but he had a genius for skimming and a comprehensive system for taking notes…. He read rapidly, looking for what he could use.” p. 67 “He read widely in…
A Witness to Power’s Mendacity
A while back I reread David Barsamian’s first collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky, entitled Chronicles of Dissent. Actually, I first heard the material starting in the mid-1980s, listening to Barsamian’s cassette tapes of interviews…
A New-Old Saintliness
On Maria Clara Bingemer, Simone Weil: Mystic of Passion and Compassion French intellectual Simone Weil has had many biographers, interpreters, and critics since she died in 1943. Brazilian liberation theologian Maria Clara Bingemer’s recent…
A New-Old Saintliness
On Maria Clara Bingemer, Simone Weil: Mystic of Passion and Compassion French intellectual Simone Weil has had many biographers, interpreters, and critics since she died in 1943. Brazilian liberation theologian Maria Clara Bingemer’s recent…