Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli historian with a love for the long view, as in where did we, as a species, come from, the topic of his first book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014), and where we, as a species, are going, the topic of his second book, Home Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016). Of course, the latter book depends on our ability to move from the past to the future through the challenges presented by the present. Just how will get from where we have been to where we are going?
He tackles the present in his third book, 21 Lessons for the...
February 17, 2019
The panel of judges was uncomfortable. One judge wondered whether the United States government had brought the very issues it was complaining about upon itself by charging the defendant with crimes carrying crippling mandatory minimum prison sentences. Another judge was quick to defend the Government: wasn’t I asking the Court to endorse jurors’ ignoring the law, a practice known as jury nullification?
I was in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, on the 17th floor of the federal courthouse on Foley Square in Manhattan. Three judges...
February 13, 2019
I’ve never worn blackface, but I’ve laughed when I’ve seen actors like Bing Cosby do so. Just like I laughed when I saw three Coors beer cans in hoods surrounding a Budweiser bottle in a noose. In the highly charged world in which the closest thing to holiness is identity, that makes me a racist. I suppose I’m a sexist, too; I think a person crying “rape” years after an event has some explaining to do.
It’s easy to throw words like “racist” and “sexist” around. It’s harder to stand your ground...
February 11, 2019
The apocalypse dawned for me in the summer of 1967.
I was living on Detroit’s East Side when all hell broke loose. The angry white men sitting on their porches with shotguns on their laps blamed it in on the “niggers,” and promised to shoot first and ask questions later if the riots spilled into our neighborhood. It was terrifying. Race mattered, suddenly.
Michael Eric Dyson was living in Detroit then, too. He was nine in 1968, when Martin Luther King, Jr., was gunned down in Atlanta. Detroit again careened into violence....
February 10, 2019
January 11, 2019
The NAACP claims I posted a racist image and has called me out for it. The accusation has made the news. Now bloggers have weighed it. So am I a...
January 10, 2019
It turns out that I am not the only person to notice the recent increase in Facebook censorship. Just yesterday I learned that a lawyer in California...
January 13, 2019
Darnell Moore was charged with murder. He was black. Almost every potential juror was white. We made an issue of it. After his conviction, the Courts...
January 3, 2019
I like to say the following to folks after one of my all-too-frequent displays of bad temper: “I’m sorry. I’m in AA. That outburst...
November 12, 2018
There’s not a whole lot written about identity politics and immigration that makes much sense. From the right come claims of...
October 9, 2018
Jill Lepore’s These Truths: A History of the United States, promises to be just the book we need in divisive times. It sets out to...