There’s an opinion piece in the New York Times today called “To Focus on Hamas Is to Miss the Point.” In it, Basma Ghalayini discusses growing up in Gaza, where experiences or near misses with violence are not a novel experience, but instead are a fundamental part of living in what is effectively an open-air…
Category: Reflections
Animal Consciousness & Suffering
How often do you really make an effort to put ourselves in someone’s shoes, and try to see things as they see them? And how often do you do that for animals? I suspect the answer to the first question for most people is sometimes, and that that is rarely for the latter. I’ve long…
Remote learning
Teachers across the United States, and probably much of the world, will tell you that this year has been one like none other, and they are not exaggerating. What many of us now take as normal – a virtual room full of student avatars, varied uses of synchronous and asynchronous time, participating in the chat…
News & Structural Violence
Last week, a handful of students walked (or logged into) my classes asking about what was happening with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One of the interesting elements of the news cycle’s return to the conflict is the way the news cycle itself responds to an escalation in violence on the part of Israel or Palestinians, but…
Expert knowledge
Why are we so confident about what we know? We assume expert or high-level knowledge in many fields of knowledge for which we have no rational basis to assume we are experts. Even in fields where we might justifiably be called experts, we regularly fail to make the best possible judgments, decisions, or predictions. Obviously,…
Hope
What does it mean to have hope? I have struggled often with being hopeful in what I frequently find to be a depressing world. Our planet contains vast natural wonders that defy imagination, and most of the people I know best strive to live good lives. Yet, we humans perpetrate death, destruction, and needless conflict…