Over the past few weeks, Arab terrorists have launched a wave of bloody violence against Jewish Israelis unparalleled since the Second Intifada. Of course, this recent violence did not erupt devoid of context. Decades of moral failings on both sides of the conflict have indeed created fertile conditions for fear and anger to fester. At the same time, with a desire to demonstrate awareness of that context, and a well-meaning urge to express sensitivity to the concerns of all parties involved, it seems some have come to the conclusion that this murderous......
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From the playground to the most serious deliberations about what it means to live a good life, many people subscribe to a definition of goodness that can be summed up as, “No harm, no foul.” In other words: As long as nobody’s truly harmed by what we do, then it shouldn’t be considered wrong. I’ve been thinking about that lately, and the more I do, the more painfully insufficient that measure seems. Recently, I appeared on multiple news shows where I heard others explain away looters in Baltimore, and cops who give......
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This week, New York Times opinion columnist and, in my opinion, all-around smart guy David Brooks published an uncharacteristic piece – one which invites a response, simply because leaving his as the last word on the topic could lead people to hurt each other when they really don’t need to. His “Leaving and Cleaving” op-ed is about people recalibrating relationships, romantic or otherwise. But it omits a fundamental tenet of the enlightened conservatism Brooks typically articulates so eloquently in his column, forgetting a central principle of the personal ethics he regularly advocates.......
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Governor Christie has committed trafficide. As fast as he rocketed to presidential hopeful, he has fallen to being “compared” to Tony Soprano. All I know is what I have read in the papers. Two of Christie’s aides have been fired for shutting down lanes of the George Washington Bridge, which connects New Jersey and New York and is the busiest bridge in the world. For four days, thousands of commuters were terribly delayed in order to create a shutdown of the roads leading to the bridge in the town of Fort Lee?-......
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I am sitting in a jurors’ lounge in Manhattan with about 100 other people, waiting to be selected for a trial or excused from jury duty (until my next summons arrives six years from now). At the cost of some embarrassment, let me be honest: I’m here after two approved postponements and one no-show/absence, which means this summons to duty had many more red lines and threats on it than previous ones. I’ve been one of the Americans behind the growing problem of courts struggling to find enough jurors for trials. So,......
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