My mother is dying. Of course, all of us are dying, and all of us are on trajectories toward death that we don't know and won't understand till it is too late, if ever.

But my mother is dying in a different way. Not that different, naturally. It's a way that many have died before, and no doubt man...

The news today is full of a lot of noise about Trump's statement in an interview that he believes he can end "birthright citizenship" with an executive order.

The entire situation is deeply disappointing, no matter what direction you look.

On the one hand, we have the usual: Trump riling people...

My sister connected with me the music of Alexis Ffrench, a UK-based "contemporary composer and pianist". Check out Bluebird and Exhale on Youtube if you want to sample the sort of stuff I'm talking about here. (Mr. Ffrench may have another, possibly secret life as a grunge artist or death metal...

This is the first of a series of posts that takes random comments from the internet that try to describe what Republicans are up to (generally from a left/progressive perspective). Each one of these comments is wrong. Keep in mind that I'm not even remotely sympathetic to Republican perspectives.

Yesterday the NYT had an op-ed by John Judis that lamented what he claimed was the left's ignorance about the importance of national identity, particularly when it comes to "democracies and the modern welfare state". The NYT appears to have removed the comments from the piece, but there was one "t...