My father died a couple of weeks ago. I loved him dearly: I was his son and also his pupil.For years I had imagined the moment in which he would be...
Hampshire College is in a woeful existential crisis that happens to be taking place during a perfect storm.Large market factors are shrinking the...
The other day, while a group of friends were bemoaning the current status of the world, I thought of Rebbe Nachman.“We are on a boat about to sink,...
Mark Twain, in his travelogue “Following the Equator” (1897), said that truth is stranger than fiction because fiction is obliged to stick to...
The Pittsburgh massacre a month ago at the L’Simcha Congregation during Shabbat morning services was the deadliest attack against the American...
With another looming election before us, it seems fitting to reflect on the current role that elites have in the governance of democracies. I...
I bought a lottery ticket a few months ago. It was foolish of me. Playing the lottery strikes me as a waste of time. It represents an investment on...
I am fascinated with memes. The insistence with which they descend on me through an assortment of technological devices is overwhelming. I do my...
‘Life’s but a walking shadow,” Macbeth says in his most famous soliloquy, “a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then...
I watch my father as he sits alone in a large room full of people. For long minutes, he stares into nothingness. This from a man who was always...
A few weeks ago, I gave my students a special assignment: to plagiarize a text, whichever they chose, with the expressed intention of improving it....
I have been in a coup d’état in Caracas, a block away from a crowded bus that burst into flames after a bomb exploded in Spain’s Basque region...