Meditations

It’s completely still. Not a leaf flutters, except for the slender yellow leaves overhanging and nearly touching the rushing stream. They quiver as the water’s current bestirs the air directly…

[For my Thanksgiving column this year, I’m republishing a piece I wrote nearly three years ago. If it seems prescient, it wasn’t. It’s simply that what was true a few…

An amusing headline in a prominent California paper reads: ”What Separates Us From Chimps.” Though it may sound like a tautology, what separates us from chimps is separating ourselves from…

A friend and I, with others in town, are inquiring into the future of humankind. I take the view that “no teacher, however illumined, has changed the basic course of…

There are two completely different meanings to death. The first springs from fear, the primal fear in humans stemming from the knowledge of death, which is as old as man.…

Reflecting on the unlikely concatenation that produced the Russian Revolution, Simon Sebag Montefiore says, “Without the Russian Revolution of 1917…the tournaments of power would likely have been just as vicious—just…

The notion that thinking together implies conformity and groupthink is as wrongheaded as the idea that conflict, argumentation and resistance are the wellspring of creativity.

Other than a downpour during the night a couple weeks ago, it was the first rain of the year. Living in a land where it doesn’t rain for four or…