Looking back on the writings compiled below, I don’t see a single theme that ties them together. I’m often interested, though, in exploring how the allegiances and identifications in our lives— sometimes acknowledged, and sometimes working behind the scenes — shape what we believe and how we act in the world.
These writings fall into four broad (overlapping) categories: politics, psychology, culture, and science. The list below may provide some reading guidance:
POLITICS
The Angel of History: Walter Benjamin’s Vision of Despair and Hope (1998/2025)
Hannah Arendt on the “Banality of Evil” and the Prospects for Peace in the Middle East (2013)
Radically Wrong in Berkeley (2017)
Social Democracy: Flickering Candle or Blazing Sun (2025)
PSYCHOLOGY
The Angel of History: Walter Benjamin’s Vision of Despair and Hope (1998/2025)
The Crisis of the Self in the Age of Information: Computers, Dolphins, and Dreams (1994)
Empathy as a Method of Rational Inquiry (2025)
Principles of Self Psychology in the Fiction of Henry James (2025)
Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, and the Skeptical Humanist Tradition (2017)
Through a Glass Darkly: How Vision Deceives (2020)
ART/CULTURE
Art and Science in Vienna 1900: Harmonious or at Loggerheads? (2013)
Hildegard’s Wander Theatre (2005)
History of the Barglow Family in Trinidad Colorado (2025)
Through a Glass Darkly: How Vision Deceives (2020)
SCIENCE
Art and Science in Vienna 1900: Harmonious or at Loggerheads? (2013)
Medicine at the Millennium: Still Caught between Descartes and Spinoza (March/April 2002)
The Quest for Meaning in Science, Religion, and Ethics (2013)
The Secret Life of Plants (2010)
Stem Cell Research: Still Embattled After All These Years (2017)
WiFi Woes: The Rollout of 5G Re-awakens Wireless Fear (2022)
Winning the Vaccination War in California (2016)
ADDITIONAL ARTICLES
Buddhists Armed with Apples: Cultural Contradictions of the New Networking Technologies (2000)
Cell Phones: Hazardous to Your Health? (2010)
The Martin Luther King Monument in Washington: Meaning and Message (2011)
