And what it does to your mind and your marriage — Who hates democracy? We all do, says French philosopher, Jacques Rancière in his 2005 book, The Hatred of Democracy. It was hated by Plato, who lived in its birthplace, ancient Athens. It’s hated even by blue blooded Americans like me. Our Founding Fathers weren’t too keen on it, either. The…

I’ve been estranged from my dad for a long time but now all I feel is compassion. — It’s 1992. A double-decker bus rattles through central London. Standing in the open doorway, gripping a stanchion, is a handsome young man. His eyes are bright, his hair jet black, his smile wide and infectious. Suddenly, the bus takes a corner too fast. The man is jettisoned onto the road…

on his 100th Birthday — I recently picked up Michael Asher’s book Death in the Sahara, about the 19th century French colonial expedition to chart a route for a railway line through the Sahara desert. The legendary city of Timbuktu was the intended destination of the ill-fated expedition. …

I recently said goodbye to my collaborator and friend Armand Ruhlman. As a filmmaker, poet, writer, and fine arts photographer he was one of the most artistically brave artists in NYC, but you’ve probably never heard of him. And if you have heard of him, you adore him. Armand was…

Somewhere along the line, we forgot that tragedies are actually…tragic — As of today, 6,572,442 people around the world have died with Covid-19 since its initial outbreak in late 2019. Six-and-a-half million people. At the height of the crisis in New York City, The New York Times reported that hospitals ran out of body bags; with 800+ people dying from the…

Here’s what they learned about genocide — When I lived in Colombia, I taught two groups of tenth-graders. They were bright and spoke English well. I was teaching them a unit on genocide and we were discussing how one of the steps of genocide is to classify and divide people into groups. While doing research to beef…