Articles 356

“The dwarf sees farther than the giant, when he has the giant's shoulder to mount on."

Three years ago, I could not imagine Ron Paul winning the CPAC straw poll. Now he has. The doom and gloom evoked by the rich and powerful are realities in…

The American economy has been marked by a tremendous concentration of private power over the past 50 years. The only question is not whether this should be reversed, but how…

Yes, a good dinner conversation is akin to chimps licking fleas off each other because it is a way of bonding and establishing relationships and hierarchies within the group.

For years, two-faced Republican demagogues have served up phony-baloney about how much they love little country churches, Norman Rockwell paintings, and old-fashioned American life, even while they were simultaneously encouraging…

What we need today is not a generation that is “spiritual, not religious.” I would argue that what is needed is the studied capacity to be “religious, not spiritual."

Obama's energy initiatives offer little change, and less hope. Large nuclear plants with massive power grids are no solution.

David Brooks on the meritocracy: good critique, bad conclusion.

Less happy for mother is the reality that the single soul, resulting from this communion of two bodies, receives nourishment from single-malt.

Whatever else you make of Facebook friendship, it underscores the great and significant discrepancy between: 1) the scale of contemporary life, and 2) the scale of friendship.

Is there a place for friendship in politics? According to ancient theory - one that continued well into modern times - not only should friendship be a main aim of…

With friends like this, you can have a world full of enemies at your back and it don't matter because your friend is your fortress.

As the half-savage neighbor in Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Most of us require an extended social network to keep us mentally and morally awake, and for a laugh, too, and if these friends are people we can weave in…

We have a Constitution and separation of powers and at least the idea of limited government because of the character of George Washington. Don’t think of Monday as “President’s Day.”

The President who promised change could not even change the Chairman, not even one who had failed so badly, and who continues to fail.

Could the very thing that makes our lives so easy also be that which makes it so much harder, particularly in encouraging our separation into our private retreats?

Call it Factory Planet: a world in which natural processes are treated as parts of a vast world-machine operated to produce a maximum amount of wealth for humans.

It may be the great sentiment of this American moment: “I want to build something of my own. How do you not understand that?”

Both the Right and Left in American politics agree with this aim - to keep America "number one."

Natural disasters and security threats seem to beg for a response that is massive, coordinated, and centralized. If so, how can the consolidation of state power be tempered and the…

Why not stand on the shoulders of the Kindle?

Lovers of snow and cold are qualitatively different from the lovers of sun and surf; they are different moral beings altogether.

Men cut off from their origins and alienated from their selves become desperate, and desperate men do desperate deeds.