Social order requires complex understanding of the human condition, far, far more than it requires a tough-guy swagger, handcuffs and a gun

Not only have the protests against police violence gone global, but they have cut deep into Western history: into its racism and colonialism, which, until now, have remained quietly unquestioned and entrenched in our institutional “normal.”

This is American racism in the raw: the emperor with no clothes. And such stories are endless

The prison system doesn’t work. To say this is not to shrug and advocate doing nothing at all, but to rethink the matter at a level deeper than the cynics believe is possible

In recent years, “post-traumatic stress disorder” emerged, which kept the matter in isolation: a “disorder” to be fixed. It’s your problem, not ours. But the term “moral injury” opens up everyone’s conscience and begins to make the matter collective

Bernie Sanders is giving voice to ideas and realities that have long been declared taboo in American political discourse, certainly at the level of presidential politics

That the FBI — the agency that saw King and the civil rights movement as a communist plot, subjected him to merciless surveillance and may have tried to get him to commit suicide — should, 50-plus years after his murder, purport to honor him was simply too much

One thing that becomes clear to me when I wander into the world, and the minds, of geopolitical professionals — government people — is how limited and linear their thinking seems to be

Can we envision a world in which bombing Libya or Iraq is as unimaginable as bombing Iowa?

The armed elimination of one’s problems, whether pure Hollywood fantasy or real-world geopolitics, is a settled addiction, accepted, even by those who recognize it as insane, as “the way things are.”