Mark Leviton
Mark Leviton lives in Nevada City, California, where he reads Wallace Stegner novels, broadcasts a weekly radio show, and perfects his quesadilla recipe.
— From October 2022All In The Family
Faith Friedlander On Adoption And Parenthood
Not every adopted adult needs the same thing, but I do think most adoptees, at some point in their lives, will want to look into their past. And someone in their birth family might come searching for them. With the Internet and readily available DNA tests, it’s not so easy to hide anymore.
October 2022Made To Be Broken
Richard Albert On The Difficulty Of Amending The U.S. Constitution
The way Americans interact with each other now has made it clear that the Constitution was perhaps never deserving of all the praise it’s gotten.
August 2022Gray Matter
Daniel J. Levitin On Why Memory Isn’t So Black And White
Seeing and hearing are selective. We register what is needed at the moment and unconsciously ignore other input. It may seem that our eyes are like a camera and our ears are like microphones, objectively recording everything, but . . . our senses are not at all like those devices.
February 2022High Time
Alyson Martin And Nushin Rashidian On The Move Toward Legalizing Cannabis
Cannabis is legal in Canada for both adult and medicinal use. Mexico could legalize cannabis by the end of this year. The United States is going to be squeezed on both sides, with Americans vacationing in Cabo San Lucas and Montreal, using legal cannabis, and perhaps wondering why their own country isn’t moving forward with similar policies.
July 2021Hidden Worlds
Merlin Sheldrake On The Unseen Life Around Us
Fungi are decentralized. They’re able to coordinate their behavior without anything resembling a brain. They can connect perception and action without having a special place to do so. The coordination somehow takes place everywhere at once, and also nowhere in particular.
May 2021Many Voices
Cristina Beltrán On What Unites And Divides Latinos
I wish the Democratic Party would put more resources into these communities instead of waiting until shortly before an election and parachuting in a few campaign workers to do some half-assed Latino-turnout work. Latinos are not automatically the firewall for the Democratic Party.
October 2020Not So Different After All
Frans de Waal On Animal Intelligence And Emotions
With the coronavirus we have another interesting issue: how we eat wildlife. Ecologists and conservationists have been saying for fifty years that we shouldn’t be eating everything on the planet.
July 2020One Of Us
Mark W. Moffett On The Social Behavior Of Humans And Other Animals
It’s important to compare things that are pretty alike, like humans and chimps, with their evolutionary ties, but when you find similarities between things that are ordinarily seen as very different, like humans and ants — that’s where the new ideas come from.
April 2020We Will Be Seen
Tressie McMillan Cottom On Confronting Racism, Sexism, And Classism
We are more comfortable in our culture talking about the distant past. We love black history; it’s black people we don’t like.
February 2020To Protect And To Serve?
Alex S. Vitale On The Overpolicing Of America
It’s a mistake to think of each episode of police misconduct as an isolated incident that might have gone another way if different officers had been involved. It’s not about individuals. The problem is a political imperative toward overpolicing.
September 2019Our Fellow Americans
Paul Chaat Smith On The Complex Truth Of Native American History
To see the full picture of Indians — as people who have had a continuing, complex relationship with all aspects of American culture — is just too much for some people. They want to put Indians in a box.
August 2019Not So Black And White
Dorothy Roberts On The Myth Of Race
I’m not saying that race is a natural division of human beings that can lead to unjust hierarchies. I’m saying that the very concept of race was invented to create and enforce such hierarchies.
April 2019
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