Uncharted homeland territory

Disrupted: The politics of belonging David Brooks, in the New York Times this morning – October 31st, 2018: “What you see is good people desperately trying to connect in an America where bonds are attenuated — without stable families, tight communities, stable careers, ethnic roots or an enveloping moral culture. There’s just a whirl of changing stepfathers, changing homes, changing phone distractions, changing pop-culture references, financial stress and chronic drinking, which make it harder to sink down roots into something, or to even have a spiritual narrative that gives meaning

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Education and the erosion of social capital

Here is a link to a Washington Post commentary by George Will. And here is a citation: “The report was so “seismic” — Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s word — that Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration released it on Fourth of July weekend, 1966, hoping it would not be noticed. But the Coleman Report did disturb various dogmatic slumbers and vested interests. And 50 years on, it is pertinent to today’s political debates about class and social mobility. So, let us now praise an insufficiently famous man, sociologist James Coleman, author of the

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The Planet and the Donald

A New York Times opinion editorial, April 20th 2017: Will we recover from the Trump presidency? Perhaps not: The thing with climate change is we don´t have much time, and not much is happening — so what happens when what little is happening gets reversed?  “President Trump’s environmental onslaught will have immediate, dangerous effects. He has vowed to reopen coal mines and moved to keep the dirtiest power plants open for many years into the future. Dirty air, the kind you get around coal-fired power plants, kills people. It’s much the same as

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Post-Donald Time

In the News: A Time for Trump, now Dump? Just recently, I hung my grandfather’s old clock on my wall, to remind myself that there is such a thing as time, even in our times. It’s the kind of clock where you can easily reset the handles, to adjust the time shown. You needed to reset time back then. Clocks didn’t tick as accurately as they do now. You also had to wind them up, since time also wound down. That was the beauty of it: Time required human assistance in

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Trump’s alternative realities

What to read and what to do about it – – – A Saturday morning ritual for many years, I read the New York Times more or less from cover to cover. When I can, I do it on paper. When I can’t, and that’s most of the time, I do it online. In recent years, I have started to prefer the online version even when the paper version is available to me. As global news go, it’s changed my way of staying informed, in part because what happens when

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Cohen moments on a rainy Sunday

Leonard Cohen died on November 7th 2016. He died a young man. All of which gives reason to celebrate, for how many people his age die young? I was looking for something entirely different on YouTube the other day, when this video showed by itself — Save the last dance for me. In some ways not a great performance – in other ways absolutely fabulous. Cohen being Cohen, there´s no such thing as a rainy Sunday morning. So I thought I´d begin a web page: Cohen moments. Not by coincidence,

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Fresh Air Radio — on a Saturday

It´s the economy, stupid: Bill said it–did Hillary listen?Sometimes you wish Bill was back, but there´s another story I have in mind right here: Not the story of how Hillary Clinton failed to take Bill Clinton´s most important piece of insight with her into her own presidential bid. Not, the story of how her failing to address the fundamentals of economic inequality in a convincing manner, led to the election of a president and subsequently a cabinet with far more of a racist inclination than what is the case with

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Trump Watch: Four years to come

Peoples´choice. I read, and I try to follow the arguments. All I know is that no one — absolutely no one – has a clue. What happens next, when a man is elected president one day and the day before was generally declared either “saviour” by half of the general public or “unfit for the office of president” by the entire establishment — except for Bob Dole, News Gingrich, Rudolph Giuliani and 200 generals? No clue. And that includes The Donald himself. No clue. He says he is a genius, and

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Thinking about the Donald

As  days pass by, the number of photos of Donald Trump will increase, as will the general impression they give. Less fun with his hair and more focus on the statesman. Meanwhile, these photos  figured at the top of my own search right now. And the Saturday Night Live version of Donald Trump – by Alec Baldwin – is a saver.

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