It all felt wild and uncontained, like on the playground. I was the outsider kid, wrong jacket, wrong hat. Or maybe I just stepped out of my car at the wrong time. With a whoop they were on me, surrounding me, laughing. What great fun.

Then one of them shoved...

"What is seen with one eye has no depth."

I'm thinking, as I ponder the wisdom of Ursula LeGuin, that American culture is at the end of what it can accomplish with its single-eyed vision. For all our material progress, for all our ability to dominate just about anything or...

"As long as a nukeless world remains wishful thinking and pastoral rhetoric, we'll be all right."

Pastoral rhetoric? This, from a writer who later refers to a "nuclear umbrella"? The words are those of David Von Drehle, an editor at large for Time magazine, who couldn't resist a faint note...

I may be wrong, but I think Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize because the selection committee was feeling as soul sick as I do at the ebbing of humanity's great opportunity to corral global militarism and fundamentally reprioritize.

Obama's election last year rode on global aspirations for...

I don't know if words can transform the world -- I know they can't bring back a murdered child -- but I have a few of them to scatter on the grave of Derrion Albert, the Chicago boy whose brutal slaying two weeks ago stunned the city and the nation:

World leaders can't seem to hold an economic summit without security forces at the level of an occupying army running roughshod over the host city. This is both a symptom of what's wrong with our global economy -- predicated on war, domination and scarcity -- and a metaphor for how...

This talk was delivered on Sept. 25, in Band-e Amir, Afghanistan's first national park, in the Hindu Kush Mountains of Central Afghanistan, Bamiyan Province, in connection with the United Nations International Day of Peace four days earlier.

I post it here to let the great hope for peace radiate...

Right up there with "our mission," in the pantheon of sacred foreign policy mumbo-jumbo, is "training Afghan security forces," that endless, multibillion-dollar prerequisite for our departure from the country.

We've been training a local army and police force for eight years now to take on the good and noble task...

"Businesses exist to serve the general welfare. Profit is the means, not the end. It is the reward a business receives for serving the general welfare. When a business fails to serve the general welfare, it forfeits its right to exist."

Do Adam Smith's famously forgotten words of caution for...

"Most of the time, we are grievously feeling that we're not getting anywhere and that in the ongoing Afghan tragedy, 'peace' or 'humanity' is a rather impractical, ridiculous thought. But there's a remnant of the human spirit left in the Afghan smile and that helps to keep me going." --...

The situation in Afghanistan is serious. We're getting "out-governed" by an enemy so ruthless it's bringing services to a desperate people ignored by the legitimate government we installed.

But our eight-year quagmire . . . excuse me, war . . . can still be won, says Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the...

I don't begrudge William Calley his remorse about My Lai, but I'm hesitant to acknowledge his apology for it.

If you steal $10 from your mother, you need to apologize. If, as you carry out orders, you lead a raid on a village that slaughters 500 or more defenseless...

It's like truth or dare. And it's legal.

Get your permit or whatever and you, too, can bring an assault rifle to the next presidential speech you attend. There's nothing the police can do -- amazing! If only the Democrats, back when George Bush was president, had known there was...

"A fight, a fight . . ."

Oh Lord. From what depths did this story come? This was the power of the peace circle, pulling something out of me beyond any known zone of emotional safety.

There were five or six of us, in a small breakout group, challenging...

Before I know it I'm sucked into the New York Times story and I haven't had my Prozac or anything.

Through the miracle of language, here we are, walking with U.S. troops on patrol through the streets of Mosul, and by the time the story's point has been thoroughly...

"Just as craving crystallizes into anguish, so does understanding flower into letting go." -- Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism Without Beliefs

I walk into the new CVS pharmacy in my neighborhood to buy a birthday card and the first thing that happens is the beeper goes off. At the same time, a...

Last week's announcement from Moscow, of a new treaty between the U.S. and Russia to begin cutting their nuclear stockpiles by a quarter to a third, is indeed "modest" and perhaps downright "disappointing" in its tentativeness, as critics have pointed out.

Even so, the heart of the future beats here.

We live in a world where arrogance and power are concentrated to an unbelievably fine point, while responsibility is diffused into a global mist. A few fanatics can plot and wage a war, stirring up consequences infinitely beyond what they are capable of imagining, then retire, when things go bad,...

"From now on, the war they started is ours."

Seemingly these words of an Iraqi soldier, noted in a Guardian U.K. story, were uttered in pride. This was on June 30: National Sovereignty Day, the day U.S. troops withdrew from Iraqi cities. Sorry, but it sounds more like someone enthusing...

When I read about the Defense Department's plans for my future security, why do I feel so insecure?

The New York Times privileged us the other day with another dispatch from what we used to call -- back in my days as a toiler in the journalistic trenches of...