I don’t tell people it’s the most important election of their lifetime. They’re tired of hearing that. I tell them that it’ll be the best-feeling vote they ever cast. Probably at no other point in your lifetime will you get to pull one lever one time and feel that you have rejected 20,000 lies with the probability of 20,000 more lies, 200,000 deaths with the probability of 200,000 more deaths, and absolute disregard for the law, the military, the Constitution, […]

Privacy is the new smoking. Which means that transparency and accountability are the new non-smoking. Which means that most of the media about politics fails to understand current politics, much less predict what’s going to happen in 2020. I am writing this to help them. One can see this in recent coverage of Beto O’Rourke. Many polls have him ranked a close third behind Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, which is rather remarkable considering their much, much larger name recognition. […]

I like the tributes to George H.W. Bush, the man. But I think there’s a lot missing in the tributes to his presidency. When I think of those four years, I see a rather astonishing, revelatory time in American life…that Bush probably should receive a little more credit for. I see Bush getting credit for “managing the end of the Cold War.” But that’s both too much and not enough. Weeks after the Berlin Wall fell, when Time magazine anointed […]

“I’m Not Black, I’m Kanye”, about Kanye West “lending his imprimatur…to the racist rhetoric of the conservative movement,” is yet another tour-de-force essay by America’s premier public intellectual. I deeply appreciate how Ta-Nehisi Coates offers so much more than he really needs to, how he opens windows and doors that shine profound light on seemingly ancillary subjects. In this case, those subjects include the pre-internet era of having to see something to believe it and Coates’ current, oddly alienating stardom that […]

Hi, George Soros here. Have you noticed how well my fake, heavily financed #metoo campaign is going? How it’s almost brought down Donald Trump! I love it. I know Trump isn’t impeached quite yet, but I got to take a little victory lap here. Nobody realizes my genius. First I made up a whole story about Harvey Weinstein and fed it to a few of my stooges in The New Yorker and The New York Times. My assistant was like, […]

What happens after Trump is no longer President? Many commentators focus on norms. You know, like using the Oval Office to promote your private businesses, like concealing your tax information, like calling opposing politicians treasonous, like attacking the judiciary and law enforcement and the fourth estate, like declining to enforce laws, like ignoring cyber-attacks on America, like refusing to hold state dinners or attend things that every other President attended. There’s no law that prevents the President from doing all […]

Let’s begin the year with a brand-new video that I co-wrote and directed; let’s sing and dance on the way to justice.  

For four years now, I have been writing 3000-plus words a week, spread over at least three entries a week. What a ride. What tremendous responses from friends old and new. My blog has been cross-posted in places like AwardsDaily, Sound on Sight, and Filmotomy, and the exposure has led to appearances/citation in The New Yorker, Al Jazeera, and The Christian Science Monitor. My blog has become part of a thriving and extraordinary community of blogs by parents of autistic […]

I love the line in that song “When Christmas Comes to Town” – “On Christmas it’s hard to be alone.” It somehow captures three different kinds of poignancy – it’s hard if alone-ness happens to you, it’s also sometimes hard to get away from people, it’s also sometimes about loving the crowd of people. Wishing you poignant association with art today and every day.

Last night was a triumph for Doug Jones and for Alabama. But it was also a triumph for the Democrats who called for the resignation of their fellow Senator, Al Franken. The other day, Senator Al Franken resigned his Senate seat over a number of allegations that he had, in the past, behaved inappropriately with women. My friends on social media have been having a collective freakout. I believe these friends have been misguided. This comment is representative: “You can’t shame […]