Got 12 minutes on this New Year’s Day for an Ode to Joy that will lift your spirit in appreciation for the year past? Yes, for that year, tempestuous and fraught as it may have been, and truly, for every other year and all the other days you have lived? With luck, there will be still more days stretching out before you, miracles all, awaiting…

Exactly what more important thing could you be going about today, on this first day of the new year, and the rest of your life?

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A note on the orchestra: Consisting of youths from Palestine, Israel, Iran, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Spain, it  was founded in 1999 by Argentina-born conductor Daniel Barenboim, who emigrated with his family to Israel at age 9, and the late Palestine-born Columbia University academic Edward Said. Their intention was to “instigate a conversation” in that historically troubled part of the world that would have the ...

I launched this blog just after Christmas five years ago with the intention of seeing where it went over the course of the next year. When that year was up, I felt moved not only to keep on going, but to compile a Holiday Photo Gallery that would highlight the work of photographers in the Flickr world who had done so much to enliven these pages and assist in exploring the themes and questions I had been posing to myself and to the readers who had joined me in this venture.

That initial Photo Gallery, meant as a one-and-done at the time, begat a second, to which I appended the word “Annual” in order to commit myself to taking a bit of time at this time-squeezed juncture of the year to pause, to marvel, to exclaim, always involuntarily, “Wow, look at that! Amazing!”

And “amazing” is what these photographs are again, in my estimation, all in their own way, just as the four previous iterations in this collec...

So it’s a tough time to be a guy in this world, yes? Our “brand,” as it were, has become rather tarnished of late, not that it was ever all that lofty to begin with. After all, the other half of the population—the distaff portion, the XXs, our “better” halves—have been hip for quite a few millennia now to the mess we keep making of things, the brutal competition for food and land and the upper hand in every argument. Our romance with war.

They’ve worked around us as best they could, even with the stark disadvantage of their smaller stature that has proved decisive when the distribution of power has been determined by purely physical means. But this uneven distribution has consigned them to live in a sort of hell of our making, shunted off to the sidelines as men went about shaping the world in their own image.

This includes men’s notions of the God above who thunders and blusters and roars i...

We go about our day lives, keeping them seamless as possible with day planners, work to-do lists, business appointments and friend meetups. We change clothes as various settings require, put sequential streams of thought together in presentations and emails, pay bills, stop to pick up groceries, get home to run down the day’s highlights with a spouse or friend.

We know who we are and what we are about in this life.

And then night comes, and…

I am being tricked and then pursued and captured in the deep dark woods by sly, evil people, stumbling and tripping, being threatened with physical and sexual violence and betrayal and hateful stares and mean, spiteful words.

This was just one fragment of several dreams endured over a matter of weeks recently by a dear friend whose life, in general terms, is going quite swimmingly...

What could possibly be in the minds of Trump voters? Not only those who cast a ballot for him in 2016, but also those who have stayed by him since then, given that everything Democrats and many-if-not-most establishment Republicans knew would happen under such an obviously unqualified, tempestuous and malformed character has come to pass.

Broken promises, unrelenting self-aggrandizement, frayed international relations, bellicose nationalism, schoolyard taunting, tax cuts for the ruling class, disdain for the environment, chaos, vindictiveness and bullying as policy—all of this has indeed happened, and even been doubled down on through the president’s first 10 months in office.

Wondering how Trump voters continue to countenance all this has been the billion dollar question as our world careens and liberals try their best not to wake up every morning with yet another Trump hangover and visions of a fut...