The PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, held annually in New York, is particularly good this year. I am attending a number of sessions, and the first will be "The Public Intellectual" on Monday, April 25.

I want to put down some thoughts on the subject beforehand.

What is...

It is beyond dispute that the unrelenting television coverage of the war in Vietnam shortened that war. Americans grew repelled by the carnage.

The Bushes learned, and so they kept the media at a distance for the 1991 Gulf war and the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. When journalists wanted...

The following poem, in English and an ancient version of the Algonquin language, is taken from various scenes in my opera The Death of the Forest. The opera is about King Philip's War of 1675-76, the bloodiest war proportionally in our history, which raged across Rhode Island and Massachusetts. It...

I recently attended a reception honoring immigrant writers and scientists sponsored by the Vilcek Foundation. It was held on the 36th floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel with stupendous views of Central Park. A good time was had by all.

A fellow guest, a literary translator and book critic, was...

If you go to The New York Times' obituary page, you will see the list of deaths of famous people who died in any given month and were written about in the paper since it was founded 160 years ago. Every month has fascinating people, but this month is a...

It was a bad idea all around for most of the human race. When Albert Einstein learned of the bombing of Hiroshima and the dawn of the Nuclear Age, he said, "We are not ready for it." By "We" he meant the human race.

Have we become ready since then?...

In 1976, I was crossing Astor Place in Manhattan with an Italian documentary filmmaker, Luciano Martinengo. We were translating the poems of the Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, who had been murdered the year before. Luciano was describing a movie that I would not see until a decade later.

It is exactly a year since my last post here. I got what I wanted: Bush out, Obama in.

Now, a new concept: Zero Destruction.

Last year, our neighborhood in New York City was fighting a plan to tear down half a city block of buildings from the 1920s...

What is the ancient Taoist story of the old Chinese farmer? He got old because he did not get too happy about good weather, or too sad about bad. Such equanimity prepared him for when his son died.

I am so not into the stock market.

My maternal grandfather,...

More than any other presidents the two Bushes have used war to stay popular. It is so high school. And yet their profound cruelty has not put them behind bars. The son is so bad that the idiot father seems a genius.

How to portray them in art? The anti-Nazi...

We do not know.

Four weeks from now, we will vote. Young people and African Americans will vote in far greater numbers than ever. Registration is off the charts.

A friend says that her African-American election district keeps running out of voter registration forms, and prospective voters are...

We are in that damn car always driving in Dallas past the depository. We care about these minutes because we know the world completely changed after them.

Lyndon Baines Johnson was a different critter than John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Kennedy had been in war, seen action, nearly been killed, was a...

During the recent GOP convention, Sarah Palin and Rudy Giuliani mocked Barack Obama's experience as a community organizer in Chicago (population nearly three million). The one-time mayor of Wasilla, Alaska (population nearly 7,000), Palin said, "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a 'community organizer,' except that you...

As the GOP meets in the Twin Cities and hides terrified behind a hurricane, let us remember:

In early January 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) warned the incoming Bush administration that the three biggest threats the country faced were a terrorist attack on New York City, a hurricane...

"Blow up all the opera houses!" said the composer Pierre Boulez fifty years ago. Opera was a dead form then, but in the 1960s Boulez started conducting, notably as music director of the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center in the 1970s. And he began conducting operas, treating them with...

Broken record here. The more I think about it, the more Al Gore seems the only really interesting choice for Barack Obama's vice presidential choice.

Of course, Obama was and is the only really interesting choice for president.

But it would be great to have two top people on...

There is a very beautiful image in cinema of a Buddhist monk weaving across a field among the war dead. He had been a Japanese soldier, in Burma, and as Japan surrenders in 1945, he becomes a monk with a purpose of burying the dead, a kind of Antigone for...

It was a beautiful morning in New York, quite hot, a lovely breeze. I took my new book, my selected poems, One Class, out for a walk. I've had copies for only a week, and the book's publication date is nine days away. I have been exhausted, because being a...

(From Norman MacAfee's Introduction to The Gospel According to RFK: Why It Matters Now (Basic Books), a new revised expanded paperback edition to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Robert Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign.)

It has been forty years now since the assassination of Senator Robert Francis Kennedy. In many...

This presidential year is a year of firsts: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, the first serious African-American and female presidential candidates.

Barack Obama is now the presumptive nominee.

I think he is the ideal candidate for our times.

Obama's experience as a community organizer and a professor of...