“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
Perhaps all kinds of courage can be arranged into 2 categories: See/Do and Think … Do. The ellipsis marks matter. See/Do occurs in the moment – the teacher who covers children with her body when the shooter comes into their classroom; the teenage boy who reaches into the burning car to pull out the stranger. In See/Do, there is no time for the imagination to do its insidious work and […]
read more
The atomic bomb began as a moment of lightning in a brain, a nanosecond shutdown of the visual cortex as the insight that unwrapped the splitting of the atom came to Leo Szilard as he stepped off a curb to cross a street in London on a gray, rainy morning on Tuesday, September 12, 1933. As Richard Rhodes describes it, “time cracked open before him and he saw a way into the […]
read more
Sunday, Day 11, County Park Road From this porch chair the empty sky goes out in the quiet of 1000 miles in every direction. Not one car comes down the road for an hour even though the ordinary Sunday shuffle of supplicants has traveled from church to brunch, any exodus but errands put on hold. A father holding his daughter’s hand walks past and waves his free hand hello. […]
read more
I’m writing this on Day 12 of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Kyiv, Kharkiv and Mariupol, cities with millions of residents, are being smashed to pieces. Almost two million refugees have streamed into countries to the West. Putin shows no sign of calling off his murder campaign – my deliberate choice of words. We’ve watched this before, most recently in Syria , where Russians and Syrians under Assad dropped barrel bombs on […]
read more
