This is the sad--and sadly serious--question I'm asking myself today. Is it time to give up on a political system that is now so irremediably broken that it has become impervious to our needs and irrelevant to our lives? Do we just leave those we elected as our representatives to...

Perhaps I shouldn't have been, but I was frankly surprised by the response to the piece I cross-posted last week from my daily blog, The Buddha Diaries. It was called, if you remember, "When Do We All Grow Up?" and its subject was the kind of foot-stamping impatience with...

(An invitation: in a moment of sudden and inexplicable insanity, I signed up yesterday to Twitter. Let me know if you Twitter too. We could "follow" each other...!)

Okay, I do understand where they're coming from, this growing chorus of liberal critics of Obama. Like them, I'd wish for...

In one corner of my mind, I have been watching the threat of the imminent meltdown of the California economy. What was once amongst the most thriving of states with an enviable infrastructure and an education system to rival any other is now approaching bankruptcy. Our once-vaunted system of schools,...

Those who have taken any interest in Buddhist teachings will already know that there are many different approaches to the dharma. For those who also enjoy the listening experience there is a pleasure in store in the form of a new release from Sounds True, a double CD offering...

Readers of my travelog, England/France, might recall that I had the good fortune to have dinner one evening with the science writer Piers Bizony and his family. After dinner, in his recently-built study behind the house, I was awed by some of the books Bizony has produced about...

I'm flattered that people want to send me their books for the kind of brief, informal comment/response I give to those I like, or those that interest me particularly. I'm especially thrilled when I hear back from an author I have written about. I have been doing this for many...

Thanks to all the galleries mentioned here for the images borrowed from their websites.

It was past time, last weekend, for me to catch up with some of the art galleries in Los Angeles. In addition to my curiosity about the current exhibitions, I had my Art of...

The current spectacle of outrage, skepticism and mistrust amongst Americans is a reminder of a theory I have shared, I know with many others, for quite some time: that we live in an increasingly ungovernable country and an increasingly ungovernable world. We face a frightening prognosis for our future.

It...

I have just returned from a men's training weekend. Okay, I think it's true to say that these weekends have come in for a lot of misinformed rumors and a good bit of nervous mockery in recent years -- particularly amongst those who might have reason to fear them the...

It's becoming increasingly clear from the news of the past week or so that the Republican Party is now the party of Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Joe the Plumber (!) and the radical right. It's frightening to see them cling to the old ideas that led them to so clear...

I sent a letter to the New York Times this morning:

President Barack Obama has asked for the collaboration of every American, rich or poor, Republican or Democrat. In view of the "tax problems" that are plaguing the confirmation of his nominees, I have a modest proposal: Let...

It is not often, these days, that I walk into an exhibition space and feel those familiar symptoms--the heart beating harder, faster, the head spinning with awe, the blood running through the veins--by which I recognize that I'm in the presence of genius. And...

So what can we say about Gaza, except that it's a humanitarian heartbreak? First off, you can't have a neighbor continuously lobbing missiles into your back yard. It's bad enough to have a neighbor who denies your right to exist, but to have one actively pursuing your destruction by acts...

I was teaching at the University of Southern California at the time that O J Simpson was its star running back, and I remember those heroic days when the young man seemed unstoppable, spirited, gifted beyond most mortals, and destined for a charmed life. What a sad sight, then, to...

... everyone. He's not even in the Oval Office yet. The media are running around like a bunch of chickens, clucking wildly about those things they don't know and those things they do. They need to replace their election drama, I suppose, with some post-election, pre-inauguration drama. It's about the...

The spectacle of those automobile CEOs arriving in Washington on their corporate jets and heading into town in their limousines in order to hold out the tin can at those congressional hearings offered a remarkable insight into the other-planetary thinking of the very wealthy and the very powerful, and...

I watched the Obama interview on 60 Minutes on Sunday evening with enormous pleasure. What a thrill to have as a President-elect a man who speaks in whole sentences on every issue put before him, who has clear and well-enunciated thoughts, a serviceable and readily accessible grasp of...

I'm disappointed thus far in the first part of Matt Lauer's Today Show interview with Sarah Palin this morning. It was all fluff. Not a single question of substance was asked. No word about her failure to have sat down for a significant interview since the disastrous rush job with...

I was so busy congratulating ourselves and the world on Obama's stunning victory that I passed over the one thing that thoroughly pissed me off: the passage of California's Proposition 8. Speaking of the undeserved power of a mean-spirited and now demonstrably diminished minority in this country, could there be...