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...

As I write this, the McCain campaign is trying to maneuver Barack Obama into going to Iraq, with or without John McCain.

It is not a good idea. It is offered in bad faith.

If Obama went, he would be at the mercy of the Bush propaganda machine, as...

"The Presidency of Al Gore, 2001-2009" began as notes for a book in three parts.

As I planned it, Part 1 is a narrative of the 2000 Gore-Bush campaign.

Part 2 is a narrative of the disastrous world brought about by Bush 43 from his inauguration to the present. This...

I have been meaning to write about whom I support in the Democratic primary. In January I backed all three main candidates. Basically, it was a case of any good Democrat being infinitely better than Bush. After John Edwards dropped out, I supported the two remaining.

As it came...

[Note: Continually thinking about how disastrous the last seven years have been, I did some imagining and research on what the world would be like if Al Gore had become president in 2001. Such a process is really about how important it is to elect the right president. I asked...

"Together we can make ourselves a nation that spends more on books than on bombs, more on hospitals than the terrible tools of war, more on decent houses than military aircraft."

Robert Kennedy said that on March 24, 1968 on Olvera Street in Los Angeles.

He was running for president,...