13 ways of looking at a bureaucrat (II): the three-eyed raven
I was of three minds, Like a tree In which there are three blackbirds. Wallace Stevens,…
13 ways of looking at a bureaucrat: vigilance amidst stillness
Among twenty snowy mountains, The only moving thing Was the eye of the blackbird. (Wallace Stevens,…
13 ways of looking at a bureaucrat
“Psychoanalysts don’t usually write essays; they tend to write lectures or papers or chapters, or what…
Massacres in history
As the violence and brewing disorder of our times disturbs us, we can readily fall into…
The unravelling of empires
US and western leaders have to find better ways to satisfy their people’s demands. It looks,…
Life expectancy
Here is a poem I wrote, prompted by estimates of rising life expectancy across most of…
Lament
Here is a poem I wrote a couple of months ago amidst the endless stream of…
Perestroika
Towards the end of Mikhail Gorbachev’s The New Russia (2016), Gorbachev recounts an anecdote told in…
Democracy’s discontents
Election nights are rites of reunification. The divisions of a society spew out over weeks, with…
Predicting Donald Trump
This is the post I wrote on 22 July this year: https://theburningarchive.com/2016/07/22/donald-trump-and-americas-wounded-pride/ Just as one should…