I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.

W.H. Auden, September 1, 1939

Understanding the more than seven decades of Israeli – Palestinian conflict, including the recent rounds of extreme violence, starts and ends with three words. All of it.

Jewish refugees arriving Haifa…

February 2018, the ice-rated expedition ship Hebridean Sky, 110 passengers and 70 crew, throttles up the Beagle Channel out of Ushuaia at the southern tip of Patagonia. Anticipation and, yes, trepidation hang in the air. Just ahead, a wild and woolly 48-hour, 620-mile crossing of the Drake Passage en route…

On February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin launched a massive military assault, a war, on Ukraine, because he claims, Russians and Ukrainians are “one people, a single whole,” and Ukraine is not a real country, only a part of Russia that has fallen into the hands of “fascists, nationalists and…

Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color line with the Montreal Royals, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ AAA International League farm team, on Opening Day, April 18, 1946. Wearing No. 9 – not the 42 for which he is now famous – and starting at second base, he had four hits, including a…

Most Americans were appalled, horrified, by the Trump-instigated January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, in which five people were killed and 140 injured. But it could have been worse, much worse. Contemplate what the toll would have been if the Trump mob had invaded…

Twenty-nine years ago today, I sat knee to knee with the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, at his home just outside Dharamshala in Northern India. We talked for one hour. 

The road there was long, five years and thousands of miles. It started in Chengdu, Sichuan province, April 1986. I…

After majority leader Mitch McConnell rammed Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination through the Senate only eight days before the 2020 election, Senator Ed Markey (D. MA) declared, “When Democrats control the Senate in the next Congress, we must abolish the filibuster and expand the Supreme Court.”

Minority Leader Chuck Schumer…

Donald Trump will stop at nothing to stay in power. For starters, despite the pandemic, and putting self-preservation above public health, he is trying to make it more difficult to vote by mail because, he says, “Mail ballots, they cheat.” 

For the last six months Trump has repeatedly…