While listening to a lecture by physicist Geoffrey West I was struck again by how important cities are to our species.1 The polis, the urban jungle, represents more than a collaborative sharing of resources–cities are the built environments that have  invigorated growth, invention and the multiplication of humanity at an exponential pace, in ways we […]

Having a vegetable garden makes fertility goddess worship make sense. After planting, one does indeed contemplate how one might petition the gods of germination, photosynthesis and squirrel plagues to do one’s bidding. For me, the garden is just a hobby. But what if  my friends and family literally depended on this miracle? (“Miracle” here meaning that […]

The day after a national election feels like living in New York the day after either the Mets or the Yankees beat the other in the World Series: some people feel an euphoric hope that, at last, the country has been set right; others limp along with the oozing angst that all has been lost. […]

The Hebrew word for breath was ruwach: the wind, breeze; movement of air from the very nostrils of God. When the Jews translated their writings into Greek they had to transfer ruwach into another language. They chose the Greek word pneuma, also meaning a movement of air, breath or wind. But Greek was much more than another […]

If I were a Muslim, I’d be ashamed of indiscriminate acts of violence carried out in the name of Allah, who said caring for orphans and widows were truly righteous acts.1 If I were a Christian, I’d be ashamed of a greedy, blood-stained history, justified in the name of Jesus, who explicitly taught love for […]

As the economic cost of publishing words diminishes, so too does the quality of the words. Yet we are realizing once again that the quality of words does not rest in their number but in their meaning. He that has knowledge spares his words.1 Confucius, Solomon and the sages uttered their prescriptions in worlds where […]

When Hosni Mubarak’s government shut down communication channels many people wondered how it would affect the Egyptian protests. Funny question. It turns out that the vast majority of history’s successful protests occurred before the dawn of the Internet. Protesters and revolutionaries have brought down governments for many centuries… long before Twitter was there to help […]