Blog Posts


Newtown, One Year Later

I am not sure there are any larger lessons to learn from the shootings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012. Mental illness isn’t the answer: Millions of Americans suffer from such maladies, few become shooters. The over-abundance of firearms...

The Joy of Zinn

History, it is often observed, is written by the winners. Losers die, are marginalized, are forgotten. History, then, is often a partial truth. It is the thief ignoring the cries of the dispossessed, and finding solace in various themes of necessity, such as Manifest Destiny, the White Man’s...

Demystifying the DSM 5

Lawyers and judges mean well, at least most of the time. At least I think we do. But although courtrooms are theaters at which life-defining dramas are conducted, the law is blind to life's larger purposes. To explain things, we turn often to experts. To explain the twists and turns that lead some...

The Joy (and Neccesity) of Anarchism

“[T]he great emancipatory gains for human freedom have not been the result of orderly, institutional procedures but of disorderly, unpredictable, spontaneous action cracking open the social order from below.” Thus concludes James C. Scott’s brief celebration of the...

A Digital Anarchist



I saw an interview of Nicco Mele on PBS, and was intrigued enough to read his book, The End of Big: How Internet Makes David the New Goliath. I am glad I did.
Mele does a good job of illustrating how "radical connectivity" -- the internet's capacity to reach across traditional...

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