A Satire Note: In Ashkenazi Jewish folklore, Chelm functions as an imaginary town of fools. The following piece, which I wrote in February of 2017 after Trump’s election, continues in that tradition. It was originally published in The Forward in their community blog, which they compassionately created…

Things like that don’t come along very often. When has the next Kate Bush come along after Kate Bush? There hasn’t been one. -Elton John When I was a teenager I was living with a crew of ex-street punks who had left the mean streets for the beauty of Denman…

When I was a much younger man I decided that I wanted to become a monk in the Thai Forest Tradition. I had some responsibilities to honour, though, so I decided that I would not leave to find a monastery which would ordain me in for two years. In the…

This song has always filled me with a sense of melancholy and longing, and almost unbearable poignancy. The song is “The Long and Winding Road,” from the Beatles album Let It Be. Particularly the line “Don’t leave me standing here, take me to your door.” Why does that song, that…

We Are What We Pretend To Be “This is the only story of mine whose moral I know,” writes Kurt Vonnegut at the beginning of his 1962 novel Mother Night. “I don’t think it’s a marvelous moral; I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend…

Although some of my favorite novels are what we usually think of as “literature,” over-all my favorite genres are science fiction and fantasy. I think this is for two reasons. The first is that sci-fi/fantasy is the most philosophical of all genres. The freedom from so-called “realism” allows the greatest…

Spinoza In Plain English Book 2 Part 7: (Propositions 12–19) In our last essay we discussed Spinoza’s fascinating view of individuality, which circumvents a number of the conundrums the philosophy of selfhood usually tangles itself in. He argues that when a number of bodies communicate their motions to each other in a consistent ratio so that they produce an action…

words from a Buddhist monk on forbearance — I am currently reading the book Good Heart, Good Mind by my teacher and abbot when I was a monk, Thanissaro Bhikkhu (available free here). It’s a book of talks he gave in Brazil and France about the ten virtues, or “parami” of the Theravadin Buddhist tradition, often called the…