Faced with a sharp drop in its endowment and a $15 million deficit the society which operates the Bronx Zoo announced what it called a realignment intended to make it "meaner, leaner and greener."

Dear Director of the Bronx Zoo:

First I would like to say...

Nothing gets the right wing's panties in a bunch more than a hyper-qualified person of color. And if that person happens to have a vagina...? Fuggedaboutit. Judge Sotomayor (a law school classmate of my mother's) was summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa at Princeton, and editor of the...

I curse my girlfriend for making me watch last season of The Bachelor. I fear that the architecture of my brain has been forever altered by that crap. Jason Mesnick was a single dad like me and being Jewish, the first minority, so I sympathized with him (until he turned...

The president's decision not to release more images of past torture was the right, real-world call. As noble as full transparency may seem, in this case it never should have been on the table in the first place. At least not now. Promise access to historians, say even as early...

In Thomas Friedman's column in the New York Times today he falls into the same traps of moral relativism that were so disastrously wrong for him in the run up to the war in Iraq. Back then he excused the previous administration of lying us into a costly, clumsy...

What moral scale could the administration and Harry Reid possibly be using for not wanting to adequately and immediately determine which former government officials either sanctified or urged the CIA to torture? If these same former officials had sexually harassed their subordinates or falsified travel reports and pocketed even just...

They ran such a supremely pragmatic and logical campaign that the way the administration is now handling this banking crisis continues to baffle. While they have touted a new era of openness -- literally opening the doors of the White House to the public on the day of the inauguration...

The President is still more popular than George Clooney but after the A.I.G. mess and if the current bank bailout plan -- written by Wall Street insiders for Wall Street insiders -- doesn't turn the economy around, then he will need to again ask us, the taxpayers, to cough up...

The president seems to be realizing about now that change is perhaps more powerful than even he had imagined. All of us who pitched in to do the impossible and elect an African-American outsider to the most powerful job on the planet now expect substantive change to a system that...

The president's almost unprecedented popularity makes him our single best weapon against the death grip of this recession. The surge of volunteerism, of communalism that thrust him from obscurity to the most powerful job on the planet now needs to be re-harnessed and focused on aiding our enfeebled economy.

Obama...

TO: 81st Academy Award® Presenters
FROM: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
RE: Significant Changes

I'm sure you are all just as thrilled as we are as we prepare to trundle out old Oscar® and friends for another unforgettable evening of movie magic. While...

I'm hoping that we're finally entering into an era that I've been dreaming of my entire life: the rise of the bookish black. The President's election might prove more transformative for black culture than even his most irrepressible admirers could ever dream. Coach Tomlin's thrilling victory yesterday as the...

This has been bugging me ever since I got back from Washington, but everyone's been on such a high since the Big Day that I felt like a killjoy muttering that our new president's speech failed to sufficiently move me. I blamed it on the cold, I blamed it on...

I'm about an hour into my trip, crammed into a very narrow seat right behind a woman who insists that her seat has to be reclined absolutely all the way, lumbering down the Jersey Turnpike from New York to Washington on a bus that I'd found on the internet. Ava...

When times are most troubled it's easiest to close yourself off from the suffering of others. But what if we zig instead of zag? Instead of wrapping ourselves up in fear, hunkering down until this damn depression blows over, what if we expand ourselves and think about others?

What if...

Social Circle, Georgia. I don't remember how my parents did it but for the past few years my ex and I would scrupulously use a different wrapping paper for the few gifts coming from the North Pole instead of from Walmart. Then, after the kids went to bed, I would...

Christmas and New Year are too close together. It's too much. You can pretty much sleepwalk through the rest of the year ("I can't believe it's already April. Where did the time go?"), but these end-of-year holidays, especially for a writer who sees everything as metaphor, freight even the simplest...

Like the rest of the progressive world I've been trying to figure out why the usually so careful Obama team would give Pastor Warren the pole position speaking at the inauguration. Certainly in the short term it was an unnecessarily insensitive choice, and it's disturbing to see many unquestioning Obama...

It seemed like a funny joke back when folks were saying that in the movies the only time America elects a black president is either pre-apocalyptic (Morgan Freeman in Deep Impact) or post-apocalyptic (Terry Alan Crews in Idiocracy).

It's maybe not so funny anymore.

Wherever you look, people whom...

By all rights we should all be curled up in the fetal position on our mattresses stuffed with what's left of our 401ks. We should all be learning to barter; taking lessons from the Palins in how to field dress wild game and then turn the hides into moccasins.