Let's stop hurting each other. You go first.
- Alta

The Twentieth Century saw many nations consumed by their own enmity. Hatred is inflammatory, and it has now reached a level where to stoke it, from either the Left or the Right, is incendiary. Beyond a certain level, public...

"Ever let the fancy roam, Pleasure never is at home... Open wide the mind's cage-door, She'll dart forth, and cloudward soar." - John Keats

Most kids visit their grandparents by car. Not me. Mine lived on Puget Sound and to see them my mother, baby brother, and I (at age...

Some will say that Barack Obama's Nobel Prize is premature. "What has he done?" they'll ask.

Obama got the prize not for doing, but for being. Not for making peace, but for exemplifying something new on the world stage -- the politics of dignity.

The Nobel Committee has simply...

Q: What do you mean by "somebodies" and "nobodies"?
A: "Somebodies" are the relatively powerful and successful, "nobodies" the relatively weak and vulnerable. Somebodies with higher rank and more power in a given context can maintain an environment that is hostile and demeaning to nobodies with lower...

I'm gonna live forever. I'm gonna learn how to fly - high! I feel it comin' together. People will see me and die. Fame!

I'm gonna make it to Heaven.
Light up the sky like a flame; fame!
I'm gonna live forever.
Baby, remember my name....

If I loved you,
Words wouldn't come in an easy way--
Round in circles I'd go!
Longing to tell you ...
How I loved you--
If I loved you.
- Carousel, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein

When we fall in love, we don't know...

For years, poet William Butler Yeats famously courted Maude Gonne -- in vain. As part of his suit, he wrote When You Are Old, in which he chides his beloved:

When you are old and grey and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And...

Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else. - Tennessee Williams

The title question comes from an old friend in response to Quests and Questions--A Path to Your Self. When a Facebook friend said she was struggling with the same question, I decided to put off blogging on "Why do...

Every other mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: "So? Did you learn anything today?" But not my mother. "Izzy," she would say, "did you ask a good question today?" -- Isidore I. Rabi, (1900-88), Nobel-laureate in physics

The knights of the Round Table sought a quest and...

Who are the nobodies? Those with less power. At the moment.

Who are the somebodies? Those with more power. At the moment.

Power is signified by rank. Rank in a particular setting. Somebodies hold higher rank than nobodies. In that setting. For that moment.

A somebody in one setting can...

Love's mysteries in souls do grow, But the body is his book. - John Donne (1572-1631), English preacher and poet

There's the Darwinian's answer--that if our ancestors hadn't been obsessed with sex, we wouldn't be here--which is reductive but incontrovertible. And then, there's the Romantic's answer--which, while ennobling, leaves plenty...

What is rankism? First, some examples; then, a definition.

An executive pulls into valet parking, late to a business lunch, and finds no one to take his car. He spots a teenager running towards him and yells, "Where the hell were you? I haven't got all day."

He tosses...

...there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. -- G. K. Chesterton, from The Man Who Was Thursday

As the debate...

I can scarcely bid you good-bye, even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow. - John Keats, from a letter to Charles Brown (1820)

A friend of mine hates good-byes and says so when it's time to part. Eager to dispel the awkwardness that seems to grow...

We were quick to look at the Gates affair through the lens of race. But it soon became clear that race was not the whole story. To bring things fully into focus, we need a second lens -- that of rank. The lens of race highlights the well-known injustices of...

America is broken. Even if we pull through the current economic crisis, recovery won't last absent an overhaul of our primary institutions.

• One out of ten Americans is now unemployed and the recovery is expected to be jobless.
• Fifty million Americans have no health insurance; two million,...

One of the lessons of identity politics is that success requires knowing not just what you're for, but also what you're against. Blacks are for racial justice and against racism. Women are for gender equity and against sexism.

Moms are for ending discrimination against mothers (fair pay, flexible work, paid...

An important new book substantiates something progressives have long intuited. Published first in Britain and now headed for the United States, it's by epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson and health researcher Kate Pickett, and its title conveys its message: The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better.

Since...

Americans are listening to Senator Obama on the issue of race, and recognizing something qualitatively different about what he's saying. That's because he's addressing race-based discrimination in a larger context--that of human dignity and affronts to dignity that are even broader than racism itself.

Racial discrimination is but...

Barack Obama is offering Americans dignity, and they're grabbing it with both hands. Dignity permeates his speeches, informs his policies, and is evident in his manner. Whether he intended to or not, Obama has become a herald of the politics of dignity.

But dignity for whom? For blacks and...