In the world to come I shall not be asked, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ I shall be asked, ‘Why were you not Zusya?’Rabbi Zusya

May 2016

  • Where Labor Rights and Sexual Harassment Meet

    The idea that the lives of models are not all glamour that there is an ugly underside is not new. We’re familiar with the push to have models that are so thin as to invite anorexia. Countries like France and Israel have passed laws against this. In the US no such action has been taken. But as far as I understand the problem is more involved than that, it includes wage theft and sexual harassment. The sexual harassment is not confined to minor infractions but according to former models is constant and even calls for sleeping with agency directors and men the agency (more…)

  • Democracy and Then What?

    The English version of the German publication Spiegel ran an editorial about the idea of the wrong majorities, of what happens when extremists win elections? Ought we to nullify their vote? In essence that would be dissolving democracy, render it meaningless. But what happens when the people vote for what is bad for them, for policies that are anti-democratic? The piece mentions the possibility of a Donald Trump victory as that of the right wing in Germany and Austria. Here is (more…)

  • Too Long Forgotten

    CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) is a gene splicing tool that can edit certain diseases out of our genes. It’s basically a form of genetic engineering. As such it is a breakthrough in scientific technology and much discussed in scientific and medical circles. Of course it could also be used wrongly, support the ideas on race of someone like Hitler for example. But that’s for another piece. CRISPR has much commercial potential and a lot of money is a stake. While it has not yet been tried in humans, its potential for therapeutic purposes has already led to controversy. The first is ethical, (more…)

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