On Monsters and Humans

Salma Hayek’s NYT piece, Harvey Weinstein Is My Monster Too, is terrifyingly moving, and inspiring. It also made me wonder about the...

The Dangers of Unsolicited Discourse

The internet is not a good place for high level discourse, especially not on Facebook. Empathy leaves and authoritarianism slips in...

The Participation Trophy: An Existential Defense

In recent years, the notion of participation trophies has become a common subject for criticism and even ridicule, many times in service...

Love At First Site

On this Tu b'Av (the Jewish Day of Love), foreshadowing the lunar eclipse, the rising artist, Keshet Leah Abulof (KLA), kindly agreed to...

Hell is other people(s), but there’s No Exit: On the Return of the Tribe

The triumph of Brexit and Trump is the lazy eye of a perfect storm—populist fears filling expanding cracks in our social contracts. The...

The Liberal Uncanny: Fascism and Freedom at the Heart of Democracy

“I know not what course others may take,” Patrick Henry concluded his speech to the Virginia Convention in 1775, “but as for me, give me...

The Meaning of Life and Death (in Politics)

Irrational! How else can we explain the conducts of Putin, Netanyahu, Maduro, Jammeh, Kim Jong-un, Tsipras and ISIS? But to understand...

Living on the Edge: Israel, ISIS and the West

I had left Jerusalem, my hometown, and Israel, my homeland, before, but this time was more painful, because it was much easier. Two years...

Self-Determination, Redux? Russia's Crimea and the Global Crisis of Legitimacy

The West could have held the upper moral hand in the Crimean crisis, but chose not to. In his annexation speech (March 18, 2014),...

A Rebellious Greengrocer: The Suicide that Kindled the Arab Spring

When the leader of Czechoslovakia’s 1989 “Velvet Revolution” and its former president, Vaclav Havel died last month, many eulogies were...

What Is the Arab Third Estate? Nationalism in the Arab Spring

On July 1, 1798, just before disembarking on the shores of Alexandria — in what is often depicted as the moment when the West, indeed ...