Browse Topics
Consumerism
Fool’s Gold
Why should someone like me worry about the recession as much as I do? I didn’t have any money before it, and I won’t have any money after it. The housing it is now killing me to buy will cost less the next time I have to buy. I have more to gain than to lose.
August 1992Living Simply
At fifty-five, I look back on a life so complicated that had I set out to make things hard for myself, I couldn’t have done a better job.
June 1992Catching Up
I’m never going to read them all. My wife knows it. My children know it. They exchange sly smiles when I haul a big box of magazines along on family vacations. Or when I announce at the beginning of the new year, as fervently as the president promising a balanced budget, that I’m finally going to get caught up. They know I’ll subscribe to more magazines, that the stack of unread issues — already taller than I am — will grow taller still.
April 1991On The Poverty Of Affluence
An Interview With Paul Wachtel
When I look back on the Sixties, I realize it would have been absolutely and utterly inconceivable to me then that the world would be the way it is: that Ronald Reagan would be President, that our society would be so increasingly acquisitive, that the growth of the underclass would have proceeded the way it has. I really thought twenty years ago that today we would look back on the kind of race relations we had in the Sixties as a remnant of some dark age — like slavery and the era of Jim Crow — and that full integration and equality would have been achieved. Obviously, I was extremely wrong, which can be grounds for pessimism. But I do think that something radical and powerful and extraordinary happened in the Sixties. We just didn’t know how to consolidate it, to keep it going.
February 1988On The Virtues Of Distrust
An Interview With Andrei Codrescu
I wouldn’t call it [my world view] cynical, I would go beyond that. I would call it a total distrust of all the cherished notions we have of progress and history — and that’s a Balkan characteristic. We can’t believe that things are going to get better, because we know from our history that they never do.
October 1987Hard Labor
Thoreau And The Meaning Of Work
More than any other commonplace notion, Thoreau attacked (largely through satire) his fellows’ commonplace notions about work. “Economy” is the first and largest chapter of Walden, and Thoreau gives the subject such primary consideration because he saw work consuming people’s lives before they had much of a chance to live, before they had enough time to reflect on the relationship of work to life for themselves. To Thoreau, the problem of finding one’s right work and integrating it into other proper demands on one’s life was a challenge that needed to be tackled early and with great energy if young adults weren’t going to step blindly into traps that were indeed much easier to step into than to get out of.
November 1986
