Role Playing or Recreating

In a recent Op-Ed (NYT, January 27), David Brooks asks us to address a fundamental dichotomy in how to think about life. His column led to a rash of good letters a few days later. Whatever one thinks of the issues and of how Brooks comes down on them, one cannot but respect a columnist [...]

Basic Principles for Foreign and Military Policy

President Obama’s inaugeral address presented a cogent summary of how the United States should act in the world. One can only hope that our foreign and military policy will come to reflect the principles outlined in the excerpt below.
“As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. [...]

A New Era

“a new era of responsibility”

Rational Models and Social Science Failures

Discussions of the economic collapse of recent months and the apparent inability of economists to predict it, understand it, or devise useful remedies for it have often focused on the inability of the rational model of economic man to explain the complexity of human behavior. Unfortunately, social scientists have not come up with a generally [...]

Scientific Self-Control

In a recent Op-Ed in the New York Times (September 12), Brian Greene reassured us that the experiments now taking place in the Large Hadron Collider cannot produce a black hole that will swallow the earth. Apparently, Hawking has a theory that any black holes produced by the experiments will disappear almost instantly. We are [...]

The “New” Ism

When I was chasing my PhD in the 1950s, I chose nationalism as an area of concentration. In those days we were little concerned with the totalitarian nationalism of the 20s and 30s, thinking primarily of nationalism that was affecting the Third World. The next year after I completed my [...]

Meaning and Time

Looking through a set of space photographs, with back-dated times of estimated existence set at anything from a few light years to many million, and thinking of the estimated time before even our sun burns out, makes one think again of the role of time and one’s own life span. The lesson is that all [...]

Making Nuclear Weapon Sense

It was heartening to read in the New York Times the appreciation of the recent proposals of Shultz, Kissinger, Perry, Nunn, and associates (Editorial Observer, Robbins “Thinking the Unthinkable: A World Without Nuclear Weapons” June 30) to move decisively in the next administration toward a world without nuclear weapons. It has always been a dangerous [...]

Torture and Irresponsibility

The end result of the Abu Ghraib scandal was the singling out for punishment a few low level American soldiers at the prison, with little or no punishment for those with command responsibility, and certainly none for the higher ups in the military, the defense department, or the CIA whose actions and inactions clearly laid [...]

Sex Discrimination in Another Guise

The revealing of Governor Spitzer’s use of the services of prostitutes led to a barrage of reporting, a barrage that fortunately seems to have stopped for the moment. Two things about this barrage were disturbing. First, the unrefuted assumption that it is a moral crime to have sex with women you are not married to [...]