Columnists

UC Berkeley students who live in the Gaia Building, the Fine Arts Building, or any of the other properties that make Sam Zell the city’s largest private landlord may be happy to learn that some pennies of their rent checks are going to Karl Rove. -more-

From its birth more than 60 years ago, Israel has always presented itself as “an oasis of democracy in a sea of despotism,” an outpost of pluralism surrounded by tyranny. While that equality never fully applied to the country’s Arab citizens, Israel was, for the most part an open society. But today political rights are under siege by right-wing legislators, militant settlers, and a growing religious divide in the Israeli army, all of which threaten to silence internal opposition to the policies of the government of Benjamin Netanyahu. Since that may include a war with Iran—and the probable involvement of the U.S. in such a conflict—the move to stifle dissent should be a major concern for Americans. -more-

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January 30th marks the forty-fourth anniversary of the beginning of the Tet Offensive, a defining event in the Vietnam War. I was a U.S. Army Transportation officer stationed in Vietnam during the 1968 Tet Offensive. -more-

Food became a metaphor for life as M. F. K. Fisher learned and explained the arts of cooking and of eating. Her reputation as a writer about food and its importance in human life began in 1937 with publication of her first book, Serve It Forth. -more-

Why is the New York Times concealing the key role that the United States played in the 1965 coup in Indonesia that ended up killing somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million people? In a story Jan. 19—“Indonesia Chips Away At the Enforced Silence Around a Dark History”—the Times writes that the coup was “one of the darkest periods in modern Indonesian history, and the least discussed, until now.” -more-

Watching a predator eat an endangered species is always awkward. Should you intervene? Yell, wave your arms, throw things? I went through that train of thought a couple of years ago as a great blue heron and a great egret ate their way through the California red-legged frog population of a small stock pond at Point Reyes. -more-

“ . . . how much easier it is to let the mind, rather than the body, do the traveling. No tickets or schedules, no borders, no passports. Thought is the one thing that remains free no matter what changes outside the head.”
—Not Now Voyager (2009), Lynne Sharon Schwartz, (contemporary writer) -more-