The Highest Opinion
Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan agree 93% of the time on cases brought before the U.S. Supreme Court (the only higher concordance between Supreme Court justices is Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor at 94%). While Ginsburg and Kagan, liberal women justices, have agreed with Justice Antonin Scalia far less (70% and 74% respectively) they were […]
Tumbling Walls
Man is a great wall builder The Berlin Wall The Wailing Wall of Jerusalem But the wall most impregnable Has a moat flowing with fright around his heart A wall without windows for the spirit to breeze through without a door for love to walk in. These few lines of poetry by the South African […]
And God Was Happy
In the beginning man created God. And man said: “Let there be God of Light and let there be God of Darkness.” And man separated those Gods and he called the Light God, Sun, and he called the Dark God, Moon, and so it was for 10,000 years. Then man asked: “Why are the buffalo […]
A Larger Puzzle
Puzzles come in all sizes and complexities. A Chanukah gift for our girls, a puzzle of 1000 pieces, turned into a month-long family project. There are some intuitive strategies for assembling puzzles all of which start with the recommendation to complete the outside border of the puzzle first. What amazed me during my participation was […]
Lifting the Ball
In January 1905 the New York Times moved its offices uptown to a 25 story “skyscraper” changing the name from Longacre Square to Times Square. The Times soon outgrew its new location, but the traditional “dropping of the ball,” to celebrate the New Year, stayed put. When the clock strikes 12am this Thursday night in […]
Devil’s Advocate
Albert Einstein famously said: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” To play the devil’s advocate could there not be a few other alternatives? Perhaps not everything is miraculous but then some things are? Or perhaps […]
Grateful Live
Apocryphal or not, the story is told of how Pete Townshend’s grandmother, hard of hearing, would query about the names of (rock) bands her grandson liked with the oft-repeated: the who? The Detours changed their name and the rock band The Who was launched. The Warlocks? Their name took a detour as well to […]
The Color of Money
I don’t know how many of the football players of color at the University of Missouri are majoring in economics but they certainly understood the playbook of the greatest American coach in the history of civil rights. In his final speech, Martin Luther King provides a lesson about the power of money as a tool […]
Circles of Trust
A few years ago a student began to advocate for us to use round tables for classes at KE. She was motivated by two factors: she wanted to be able to hear everyone and see everyone (and be heard and seen by everyone) in class. She offered to pay for a round table. It turned […]
Seeking You
“Seek and you shall find what you seek is seeking you.” Common to stories such as The Treasure Under the Bridge (Rebbe Nachman), The Alchemist (Paul Coelho) and The Wizard of OZ (Frank Baum) is coming to find that what is sought after is already there—already present but just unseen. The heroine or hero could […]