“A Short History of Philosophy” By Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins.
305 pages
Oxford University Press 1996

Some weeks ago I began preparing a high school level course in philosophy. I’m enjoying it greatly. That is, I am learning a lot by teaching. Now something has happened which will shape the part of the course left to prepare, and – indeed – will lead me to rework what I’ve done. I had assumed that I was working in something of a void. I did not read more

“A Promise of Justice,” by David Protess and Rob Warden.

A PROMISE OF JUSTICE, by David Protess and Rob Warden, 1998, tells the story of four men who were framed by police and prosecutors and put in prison and on death row for eighteen years. Although you know before reading the book that the men were eventually exonerated, the book grips you.

It’s a courageous, honest, and intelligent story of prosecutorial corruption and defense lawyers’ almost superhuman incompetence. read more

Beyond the President of Good and Evil
March 14, 2004

“The President of Good and Evil” is a very strange new book by acclaimed philosopher Peter Singer. Singer is a native of Australia who currently teaches at Princeton and lives in New York, and whose many books have been widely influential, particularly in the area of animal rights. Singer is famous for criticizing the individual behavior of most of us in wealthy countries as falling far short of an ethical level of sacrifice on behalf read more

Poor Workers’ Unions: Lessons for Labor
Feb. 23, 2005
Poor Workers’ Unions, by Vanessa Tait, South End Press, paper, $20

At a time when the U.S. labor movement is engaging in an unprecedented
public debate over the course of its future, one of the luckiest breaks we
could hope for would be for an informed and talented labor communicator to
publish a book that not only advocates a focus that has been missing from
the discussion, but also lays out the evidence read more

Nursing Against the Odds: The Workers’ View
March 12, 2005
“Nursing Against the Odds: How Health Care Cost Cutting, Media Stereotypes, and Medical Hubris Undermine Nurses and Patient Care,” by Suzanne Gordon, Cornell University Press, 450 pages.

Nurses. Nurses. Nurses. Already I’ve guaranteed that more people will find this article on the internet who are searching for pornography than who are searching for answers to our health care crisis or insights into one of the most read more

“Dancer in the Dark”
24 February 2001

Tonight I saw the most painful movie I’ve ever seen, in fact the only painful movie I’ve seen in my life. I was fidgeting and squirming, covering my eyes, shaking, and moaning during this horrible thing. A half dozen people left the theater during some of the worst parts. My wife nearly vomited. I still feel ill hours later.

There was nothing gruesome or frightening in “Dancer in the Dark.” It’s not a horror flick. read more

We Need Majority Rule

What we need now is majority rule. If that sounds frightening or risky, probably the best thing you can do is read “Here, The People Rule: A Constitutional Populist Manifesto,” by Richard D. Parker (1994).

This brilliant little book will convince you that our culture is full of anti-populist sentiment, and that it shouldn’t be. In my own work I have run into this problem. After the organization I work for campaigned to block the privatization of five New read more

New Clothes for the Emperors Club

Nietzsche pointed out that Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” was misnamed, that it was a play about Brutus. The movie currently in theaters called “The Emperors Club” is not misnamed, but it is not about the teacher that critics claim it is about. Nor does the title refer to some sort of secret prep-school society, as “Dead Poets Society” did. The Emperors Club is the plutocracy into which George W. Bush was born, and its sins read more

Why Aren’t Americans Happy
July 26, 2004

The past 30 years have seen tremendous growth in the United States in productivity and wealth, and yet we don’t all seem very appreciative. In fact, as Yale political scientist Robert Lane has documented, surveys have found Americans’ assessment of their level of happiness declining significantly. The same is not the case in other developed countries.

The United States contains less than 5 percent of the world’s population and spends read more

Daniel Quinn has an idea. He sees homo sapiens as on the verge of self-destruction and traces the major behavioral patterns bringing this about back to what is commonly referred to as the agricultural revolution. According to Quinn, we long supposed our species to have originated when writing originated some five thousand years ago, and continue to suppose “humanity” to have begun when what Quinn calls “totalitarian farming” began some ten thousand years ago, and this despite read more