Summer Reading
A Brief for the Defense Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies are not starving someplace, they are starving somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils. But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants. Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn...
Commonweal Spring Letter
May 30, 2018 Dear Commonweal Friends: I hope this Spring Letter finds you well. We live in unimaginable times. The forces working against freedom and the earth are global: climate change, war, terrorism, authoritarianism, and more. I return to the global challenge...
The Upside of Down–and Other Readings on Global Future Shocks or Collapse
Dear New School Friends: My last posting to you March 12 was a working paper called Courage in Dark Times: Choosing Resilience in the Face of Global Systems Collapse. It was reprinted by the Health and Environmental Funders Network as a newsletter and on its website....
Courage in Dark Times
Choosing Resilience in the Face of Global Systems Collapse This is a working paper. It is in a period of rapid evolution as of 3/12/18. Comments are welcome, though I cannot respond personally to all. What Future? What does the future look like? We cannot know. To the...
Enneagram: Some Amateur Reflections
I’m reading a slender volume by Claudio Narano—Ennea-Type Structures: Self Analysis for the Seeker. Naranjo is a Chilean psychiatrist, now in his 80s, who lives in Berkeley. He is a founding interpreter of the enneagram of personality. He was a close friend of Carlos...
A Few Favorite Things…
Dear New School Friends: Thank you for being so generous in supporting The New School in 2017. We depend on you. You have been most generous. What can I say about the new year? The political drama continues, but the culture is responding. The #MeToo movement is an...
Poetry, Song, and Turning 74
Dear New School Friends, We just completed our 197th Cancer Help Program. We will hold our 200th in April. Each time eight people show up from a cross the country -- and often around the world. Many have recurrent cancer. They come for many reasons. They come to find...
North Bay Fires: Commonweal Voices
Dear Friends, The confluence of catastrophes that have been circling the globe has landed in Northern California with disastrous fire losses in Sonoma, Napa, and Mendocino Counties. Commonweal has many friends, Cancer Help Program alumni, staff, and board members in...
The Noise of Time
The Noise of Time is the title of a novel by Julian Barnes based on the life of the Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovitch. Here is the beginning of an elegant review in The Guardian: Julian Barnes’s last novel, the Man Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending (2011),...
The Blue Whale on Bolinas Beach
Dear New School Friends, A 79-foot young female blue whale washed up dead near Agate Beach in Bolinas on Friday, May 26. For our community, it was one of the most significant events in the 45 years I have lived here. A lot of us felt deep grief about her death -- she...
Politics, Friendship, and the People of the Book
Friends: I am back in Paris at the end of this month-long European journey. I’ve also been in Brussels, Geneva, Cardiff, and Amsterdam. We’re working to promote trade treaties that protect people and planet. We are also working to preserve Europe’s unique...
Politics and Philosophy in Paris
I left Paris on Sunday, May 10, the day of the presidential election. The election had two rounds. Emmanuel Macron and Marine LePen qualified for the final round. Macron, like Hillary Clinton, defeated the left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon, the equivalent of Bernie...