Wednesday – May 1 Despite incessant GOP attacks on unions with their Orwellian-named “right to work laws,” increasing income inequality may push Democrats to aggressively push for more actual workers’ rights. I was struck that Joe Biden, in announcing his presidential bid, said he was “sick of this President badmouthing unions.” Later he tweeted, “Labor […]
Monday In an important debut article for the Atlantic, former New Yorker writer George Packer mentions a Bertolt Brecht poem to illustrate the threat that the GOP currently poses to democracy. The article contends that Donald Trump is the logical culmination of the Republicans’ 50-year descent into an authoritarian, white identitarian party. According to Packer, the descent […]
Trump, like Mac the Knife, is an escape artist extraordinaire. Might a presidential pardon save him as a reprieve saves Mac?
Monday A Bertolt Brecht poem came to mind when Retired Navy Admiral William H. McRaven came to the defense of former CIA Director John Brennan, stripped of his security clearance by a Donald Trump angry at his criticisms. Vox has the story of what happened: The man who led the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in […]
I share here my “last lecture” from my retirement ceremony. (But rest assured: I will not be retiring from this blog.)
A transcript of a talk given at the University of Ljubljana on “how literature changes lives.”
During World War II Bertolt Brecht wrote quatrains that speak powerfully to our own political times.
To understand why cops continue to shoot innocent people of color and why juries acquit them, Brecht has the definitive explanation in his play “The Exception and the Rule.”
Bertolt Brecht’s “”The World One Hope” addresses the problem of growing callousness but then points to how we can break through to compassion.
