A Kitchen Table Advent
Short Reflections to Share with Family & Friends.
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What Kind of People Live Here
Unhappiness is an inside job. But you’d hardly know it. We’re so used to blaming others for our state. “I don’t like my job—I work with a pitiful group of people.” “I hate this town. It’s full of lousy people.” Or “I stopped going to that church. It was full of nothing but hypocrites!” Like…
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What Arnold and Dominique Really Want
It’s not been a good week for Arnold Schwarzenegger; worse for Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Schwarzenegger, the erstwhile governor of California, admitted to fathering a child with a member of his household staff. Strauss-Kahn, the IMF chief, was yanked off a plane after—police say—he sexually assaulted a hotel maid in his $3,000-a-night room. These lurid stories play…
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In Victory, Magnanimity
How soon we forget. Americans remember how painful it was, in the hours after 9/11 as we mourned our dead, to see garish, hideous images of people dancing in the streets. Who could rejoice at such a moment, much less take to the streets in a public dance of revenge? But there they were,…
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This is Your Brain on Technology
A mother was asking me the other day for resources on how to talk to her six year-old son about death. It wasn’t that a family member had died—or the family dog had. The boy was playing violent video games on play dates (“I don’t allow them in our home” she said), and he came…
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Who Will Stand Up?
Stories continue to flow out of Egypt, so many tales of determination, hope and valor. Protesters who were not afraid to stand up to a notoriously brutal state police force. Women and men who sniffed lemons, onions and vinegar to stand their ground even when tear gassed, who stood up to rubber bullets wearing only…
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The Wire is Dead
The uprisings in Cairo have the world in thrall. How is it that people can live for decades in fear, and then suddenly take to the streets, defying soldiers and tanks? On the news last night an Egyptian man said, “Even if the army kills us, we are not afraid anymore.” That moment when fear…