Review: Caste– The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson, 2020, 475 pp., Random House
As the razor-edged finale to a presidential election riven by ambiguity reaches its conclusion, one overarching reality will endure in stark clarity: the bi-polar, cultural disease dividing America into two angry and unforgiving camps.
Rivers of words diagnosing the malady are fast becoming analytical torrents. Recrimination and reaction to its implications are beginning and...
The 2016 Republican Party Iowa Caucus results gave us a preview of how Donald Trump responds to an election loss.
In the afterglow of what the Des Moines Register referred to as GOP Sen. Ted Cruz’s “unexpected smackdown” of then-candidate Trump, @realDonaldTrump took to Twitter to accuse the senator of fraud.
“Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he stole it,” reads the tweet. In a subsequent tweet, Trump...
In this wide-ranging conversation, Urbānitūs Associate Editor Robert Brehm and Professor Harvey J. Kaye thumb through the pages of Take Hold of Our History: Make America Radical Again. The book, a collection of Kaye’s speeches and essays, is author and historian Kaye’s manifesto to remember, redeem, and embrace the American radical story from the nation’s founding to the Emancipation Proclamation, the New Deal and the...
In the classical Greek myth, Pandora opened her infamous box, releasing death, destruction and untold suffering into the world, much like a virus called COVID-19. But then she closed it as quickly as she could, and she trapped inside one remaining human attribute.
This was hope.
Throughout this series on my journey through a pandemic, I’ve sought to be candid about my own experience, through the phases...
Acceptance is not surrender.
That idea seems such a clear aphorism. Accepting what we cannot change and summoning the courage to change what we can is, after all, among the wisdom that binds all the ancient scriptures, from the Talmud to the Bhagavad Gita to the Gospels.
But making this distinction, through the early days of paralyzing fear, into the moments of euphoria wrought by early success,...
If the fear phase of my pandemic journey fused suddenly, and if the state of euphoria came as the crest of a wave, the third stage of depression arrived more like fog rolling in, a malaise that crept upon me slowly.
As I suggested in my first essay, the catalyst of the cancellation of the SXSW festival made the reality of the pandemic stark and ushered...
We doubledowned on Slack to get random eyeballs on problems. We raised the synchronous sharing of Google Docs and Sheets to an art form. We invited customers, partners, investors, and board members to join us more regularly on Google Meet or Zoom, to help lift the wind in our sails
It was the eve of the last day in April, the end of the first quarter...
Leadership in the time of COVID-19 - A CEO’s journey
Fear, euphoria, depression, acceptance, and imagining what lies beyond
Part I of V: Fear
It was late in the afternoon of March 6. A month or so of headlines had focused on this strange new virus emerging in China’s Wuhan province, killing the then-staggering number of 3,000 -- almost all of the victims in that country. The movie...
We’re waiting for the day when we can say, it’s over, foreverWe’re tired of all the lies, and all the guys who’ve gone to jail for himWe’ll celebrate the day he slinks away to Mar a Lago, or whereverAnd saves us from the unacceptable behavior of someone so dimHis narcissistic mind will have to find another victim, when we evict himThe bigotry will fall just...
The Affordable Care Act, or ACA, the signature policy of President Barack Obama’s administration, was the culmination of nearly a century of contentious policy battles over health reform in the United States.
The future of the sweeping ACA – with implications for the health care of millions in Texas and the nation -- remains acutely uncertain. The ACA will face a direct challenge in the Supreme...
