There must be something missing from my brain. While the national hysteria veers from gory descriptions of Newtown's mass shooting to gun control to mental health services to push back against stigmatizing those who are of unsound mental health, my mind registers the tragedy as ordinary.

Like the loss of...

I've been abroad in Saudi Arabia for the last couple of weeks. Between this trip and my last one, I've spent nearly a month there, mainly in the city of Jeddah, but I've also visited Mecca and Medina. This should not be considered reporting, or the profile of...

Benjamin Franklin would not be proud. The embodiment of the Protestant work ethic in Max Weber's most famous, pithy monograph, Franklin represented an attitude toward work that coupled industry with frugality, the signature sign of grace according to Calvinist doctrine. Hard work was an end in itself; prosperity was to...

New York City teacher Jamel Mims faces up to a year in prison for nonviolently protesting the most controversial racial profiling policy in America today. Last year, he was one of the key members of a civil disobedience campaign to stop Stop-and-Frisk that boasted the iconic academic Cornel West as...

Alongside observing patterns in the flight of birds, daily horoscopes and tarot cards, I find watching coverage of the presidential election initially amusing, occasionally intriguing, a hypnotic waste of time, and ultimately an unforgivable assault upon rational society. Fortunately, preventing the theft of one's brain cells by...

One year ago, a park in New York was taken over by a band of urban survivalists driven mad by the systemic causes and consequences of wealth inequality in America. The occupation and its message were so resonant with the world outside this park that within two months it exploded...

Strip Tina Fey of her Mark Twain Award. The prestigious comedy prize has been awarded to the wrong person. Not because Fey isn't funny -- at times, she is roaringly so -- but rather because she has failed, catastrophically, in creating a popular comedy that comments on American race relations...

Copenhagen -- Thousands of people disillusioned with the United Nations climate change conference here engaged in mass civil disobedience on Wednesday, attempting to break into the conference to hold a "People's Assembly" that was to present a more ambitious set of goals for cutting carbon emissions, and emphasize the disproportionate...

The Obama administration has an 'Israel problem,' and its recent focus on freezing Israeli settlement construction is a far cry from the solution, according to the Israel Policy Forum's report released last Monday, which distills the opinions of a distinguished group of some twenty former and current Israeli officials,...

Health care reform in America stands unrivaled as the most effective prism through which to understand the emergence of a new political landscape in 2009.

The stakes are as high as they can be. Discussion about health care -- even if opaque from a policy perspective -- incites a number...

"We're not having a strategy of hope," declared Major General J. Scott Gration at an intimate roundtable discussion with bloggers about Sudan at the State Department Friday morning. Gration, President Barack Obama's special envoy to Sudan, spoke with calm optimism about the role of the United States in the fate...