Dr. Robert Zaller

Politics

How To Be a Citizen in the Age of Trump

“Hey, I’m President! I’m President! Can you believe it?!” That’s what Donald Trump said in celebrating the passage of the American Health Kill bill through the House of Representatives at a beer party on the [ Read Article ]
Politics

Democracy and the Sixth Great Extinction

Is the fate of the planet—that is, of our fate on it—tied to the fate of democracy? I think there are grounds for suggesting it. You could make a negative case for the proposition. Democracy, [ Read Article ]
Politics

Donald Doubles Down on His Base

So, what’s a fellow to do these days? Donald Trump was riding high a few months ago. He had what he liked to call a booming economy—booming, that is, for billionaires, with a stock market [ Read Article ]
Music

Of Sacred Spaces and the Right of Protest: The Orchestra’s Tour of Israel

The Philadelphia Orchestra’s just-concluded tour of Germany, Austria, and Israel has been the most controversial in its history. No, visiting Germany, where a resurgent right wing openly invokes the symbols of Nazism, wasn’t the problem. [ Read Article ]
Academics

Outsourcing the Future: How America Has Abandoned Its Commitment to Public Education

America’s retreat from its century and a half commitment to public education has now become a rout. There has not been a greater betrayal of our country in my lifetime. There is no more disastrous [ Read Article ]
Politics

Will America Have an Election in 2020?

In 2000, Vice President Al Gore conceded a disputed presidential election to George W. Bush after the U.S. Supreme Court effectively ended his legal challenge to the Florida vote by the Republican State Secretary who [ Read Article ]
Politics

What Does a Fair Trial Cost?

What do Bill Cosby, Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, Leslie Moonves, Kevin Spacey, Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman, James Levine, Charles Dutoit, Peter Martins, John Conyers, and Al Franken have in common? They are all prominent males [ Read Article ]

Review: Robert Jay Lifton. The Climate Swerve: Reflections on Mind, Hope, and Survival.

Literary

June 25, 2018 0

Robert Jay Lifton set out long ago to be our catastrophist: the chronicler of the grim age of the twentieth century that included the two most terrible wars in history, and, with the advent of [ Read Article ]

Tantrums from the Commander-in-Chief: Not a Good Way To Go

Politics

January 11, 2017 0

In her classic study, On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross identified five stages of reaction in patients suddenly informed of a terminal illness: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. President Barack Obama, in the lame-duck [ Read Article ]

Politics

Donald Doubles Down on His Base

July 14, 2020 0

So, what’s a fellow to do these days? Donald Trump was riding high a few months ago. He had what he liked to call a booming economy—booming, that is, for billionaires, with a stock market [ Read Article ]

Politics

On Living in a Pariah Nation

July 25, 2020 0

America was a curiosity country in the nineteenth century, attracting such figures as Alexis de Tocqueville, Charles Dickens, and Rudyard Kipling. By the end of the century, it was a world power. Its own elite, [ Read Article ]

Politics

The Fire This Time: Race Explodes at Last on Obama’s Watch

October 13, 2016 0

After Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, after the killings of unarmed and unresisting African Americans—one a child of twelve—in New York, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Charleston, the murder of Freddie Gray in Baltimore on April [ Read Article ]