A brief TFR shout-out to Michael Maze for bringing this wonderful piece to my attention. This is pretty special, everyone should read this...as I'm learning...this means me. Selfishly, I'd like to connect it to a post I recently wrote about...

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I suppose it's blase to beat up on anyone in this administration these days, but honestly, this was too much. Since today is National Apathy Day (chemically, at least), I wanted to posit some kind of passing/flailing/stabbing moral inquisition...

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Nina Simone, 1962, Eretz Zavat Chalav (A Land Filled with Milk and Honey)...

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A good friend pointed me to this. Smith Magazine is hosting a six-word memoir contest, allegedly in the spirit of Ernest Hemingway. Legend has it that Hemingway was once challenged to come up with a story using only six words...

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For anyone hungry for a fascinating debate about religious moderation, fundamentalism, atheism, and faith, I urge you to check out Beliefnet for an ongoing dialogue between the eminently brilliant and articulate Andrew Sullivan and the always brave Sam Harris....

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Who Americans Are and What They Do, In Census Data From The New York Times: More than half of American households owned stocks and mutual funds in 2005. The 91 million individuals in those households had a median age of...

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Now that I’ve returned, I am no longer a reporter; I can’t really convey the life or tone or mood as it shifts from over there. It’s funny to say that while I’m probably not imagining it, the entire issue...

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...After all the news and speeches and soapboxes and posturing and ideas and conventions and the hatred and the mistrust, the long bouts of hours in vans or buses and meals and streets spent with the “them” delegate of “us and them,” I found that Bush’s sentences (or Michael Gerson’s rather) sound almost the same as they do out of the mouths of the Arab contingents that Bush describes. It’s just that the “us” and the “them” are simply switched.

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As I feel my personal stock in Zionism waning, or maybe just shifting, I go to Har Herzl, which is the major Israeli military cemetery (akin to our Arlington ...but existentially very different) to test the feeling. It's a...

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...It's a small cobwebbed building that inspires a modest patriotism; you sit in this small room probably the size of the Oval Office (except it's rectangular) and wonder how people, so few people, would decide to be heroic enough to to actually sign a document that the world endorsed but their neighbors would never accept. You wonder why they keep signing documents that all its neighbors will never accept. Is the heroism in having that faith?

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...Israel is an idea. Hebrew and Arabic are its official languages. In its biggest museum, there are Monet paintings given from the Jews of Paris and Signac works given from Antwerp. Max Ernst has donated twelve of his own paintings to hang beside Arab artists, political sculptures and photography that encapsulate the sentient conversations of Israeli society today. Biblically-themed art is rampant and Marc Chagall is difficult to miss. There are names of Jewish artists you've never heard of, their dates of birth tend to begin in the early 20th century and the years of their deaths lay heavily between the years 1941-1945.

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“Only I Get To Pick On My Little Brother” by Amelia Chandler-Lewy All armies are the same Publicity is fame Artillery makes the same old noise Valor is an attribute of boys Old soldiers all have tired eyes All soldiers...

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I decide to wonder who can teach a person to ever feel as powerful as an indigent street magician, as disquieting as a consternating chanteuse, or at most, as hollow as a faithless theologian. After all, how the lessons are constructed and how they are absorbed are entirely subjective and completely arbitrary, most people miss them, perhaps more than once. But sometimes they seem to arrive on unexceptional afternoons. Sometimes they have to be sought out. Sometimes they have to be bankrolled by trust funds. I won’t bother mentioning what was on the news when I finally got home.

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