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But who was behind it all? Mikhail Gorbachev? No one will disagree that, with perestroika and glasnost, and, most of all, with his explicit rejection of force, Gorbachev set off the avalanche of revolutionary change. But did he know what he was unleashing? I'm sure Gorbachev intended to free th…

[...] one of the unmentionable facts of everyday life is that we're all made of meat, as I remember when I walk alone, regularly, in the territory of mountain lions. The carnivorous Inuit sometimes say, "The great peril of our existence lies in the fact that our diet consists entirely of souls," wh…

I've met privileged young people who were shocked when they discovered the destructive force of injustice in the lives of others around them. Some left their careers to work for human rights or to teach or to tend the damaged. Many lives have a moment of rupture that is an awakening and a change of…

Others' woes can be used as reproaches and sometimes are: how dare you think about your own private suffering when wars are raging and children are being bombed? There is always someone whose suffering is greater than yours. The reproaches are often framed as though there is an economy of suffering…

Sometimes to accept is also a gift. The anthropologist David Graeber points out that the explanation that we invented money because barter was too clumsy is false. It wasn't that I was trying to trade sixty sweaters for the violin you'd made when you didn't really need all that wooliness. Before mo…