Do Biden’s bank bailouts create a ‘moral hazard’?
Reading Time: 3 minutes The Biden administration is insisting its recently announced bailouts of two failed tech-focused banks—Silicon Valley (California) and Signature (New York)—is something else. But experts in previous government interventions to save failing financial institutions, notably thos
NXIVM: Why are we so endlessly in thrall to deadly cults?
Reading Time: 6 minutes They’re all of one twisted mind. Donald Trump. Scientology. People’s Temple. Branch Davidians. Heaven’s Gate. NXIVM. Every personality cult that ever existed. They all weaponize charisma, weaponize it ruthlessly against innocent people’s often fragile, vulnerable, gullible ps
Legislator’s dashiki invites sting of systemic racism
Reading Time: 3 minutes As an American traveling the world over the years, I noticed with curiosity that, especially in foreign cities, people generally dressed as Americans do—clad not in their traditional garb but in Western-style (global West, not Wild West) shirts and pants, blouses and skirts.
‘Pluck yew’
Reading Time: 4 minutes Pluck yew. If you believe what you read on the internet and are a sucker for an amusing story, you might think that the most widely used curse in modern America—and its physical manifestation (i.e., “flipping the bird”)—evolved from this supposedly ancient, undecipherable epi
SCOTUS agrees to rule on yet another Christian privilege demand
Reading Time: 4 minutes Here we go again. The endless campaign by devout Christians to get special treatment in American commerce and the public square continues unabated, despite, over decades, multiple court cases unequivocally rejecting most of these serial entreaties. But it’s a new day in the j
You thought HAL was creepy? Meet Sydney
Reading Time: 4 minutes We’ve already seen what havoc technology-exploiting evil operators can wreak on people and societies. More than 70 million presumably-sensible Americans voted in 2020 for a presidential candidate whose entire political message was—and continues to be—built on easily-shredded
Understanding Sen. John Fetterman’s struggle to understand
Reading Time: 4 minutes Note to readers: The New York Times reported February 16 that Sen. John Fetterman checked himself into a hospital the week before for treatment of his clinical depression, which has worsened as he adjusted to the rigors of US Senate work after suffering a life-threatening str
When is killing justified?
Reading Time: 5 minutes I watched uncomfortably as a municipal employee expertly slit the terrified little goat’s throat in Dammam, Saudi Arabia. It was 1985. The tiny, skittish beast made not a sound during the quick execution, except for the hyper-nervous skittering of its hoofs slip-sliding on th
Your plastic grocery sack is a villain
Reading Time: 4 minutes I’ll never forget what I saw in a dirt-poor, dusty Yemeni mountain village more than a decade ago. It was plastic bags—the kind city-dwellers have long toted groceries in—and they virtually covered the steeply sloping mountainsides that fell away from the roadway bisecting th
When living kids become organ donors
Reading Time: 4 minutes The passage below, quoting “Anna,” the traumatized child protagonist in Jodi Picoult’s disquieting novel, My Sister’s Keeper, sets the messy table for this essay: My parents tried to make things normal, but that’s a relative term. The truth is, I was never really a kid. To be
Bleeding blue: How to serve, protect, and not kill
Reading Time: 6 minutes It seems we may be focusing on too many of the wrong things in the fraught aftermath of an enraged fatal beating by seven cops of an unarmed Black motorist last week after a traffic stop in Memphis, Tennessee. Potential solutions might be far less complicated and opaque than
Vasectomies are suddenly a hot birth-control option
Reading Time: 4 minutes Why are vasectomies cool again? Since the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year overturned Roe v Wade, a landmark 1973 federal law legalizing abortion nationwide, urologic healthcare providers have reported a sharp uptick in men seeking vasectomies—the male equivalent of women