The weather's turned, and the old neighbors creep out
from their crammed rooms to blink in the sun, as if
surprised to find they've lived through another winter.
Though steam heat's left them pale and shrunken
like old root vegetables,
Mr. and Mrs. Tozzi are already
hard at work on their front-yard mini-Sicily:
a Virgin Mary birdbath, a thicket of roses,
and the only outdoor aloes in Manhattan.
It's the old immigrant story,
the beautiful babies
grown up into foreigners. Nothing's
turned out the way they planned
as sweethearts in the sinks of Palermo. Still,
each waves a dirt-caked hand
in geriatric fellowship with Stanley,
the former tattoo king of the Merchant Marine,
turning the corner with his shaggy collie,
who's hardly three but trots
arthritically in sympathy. It's only
the young who ask if life's worth living,
notMrs. Sansanowitz, who for the last hour
has been inching her way down the sidewalk,
lifting and placing
her new aluminum walker as carefully
as a spider testing its web. On days like these,
I stand for a long time
under the wild gnarled root of the ancient wisteria,
dry twigs that in a week
will manage a feeble shower of purple blossom,
and I believe it: this is all there is,
all history's brought us here to our only life
to find, if anywhere,
our hanging gardens and our street of gold:
cracked stoops, geraniums, fire escapes, these old
stragglers basking in their bit of sun.

"The Old Neighbors" by Katha Pollitt, from The Mind-Body Problem. © Random House, 2009.

Temperatures getting close to 60 today and I hope to get down to the Potomac River and celebrate being outside again. I love it when good weather makes its comeback in Spring and we all meet each other again.

Since 1986, every brainstorm session we've facilitated has included a large poster of Albert Einstein. I don't remember exactly how this tradition got started, but I'm glad it did.

Somehow, Einstein's smiling countenance inspires everyone in the room -- no matter what their social style, gender, title, or astrological sign.

The only thing I find more fascinating than this is the incredible amount of powerful quotes he left behind for us to contemplate. Take a look...

"Not everything that counts can be counted; and not everything that can be counted counts."

"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."

"The only real valuable thing is intuition."

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science."

"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

This is pure joy to someone who has more photos of Einstein around his house than should be legal. They help keep me thinking. I stopped the citation at my favorite quotation; click through to the whole post for more...

Last week on the eve of the Health Care Reform Summit, I wondered if the changing nature of work, the real driver underlying the need to reform our current employer-sponsored health care system, would be mentioned.  I even created a brief survey asking you to place your bets, on “How will the ‘changing nature of work’ as key health care reform driver show up in tomorrow’s summit?”  The responses were split:

• 50% said, “It will not be mentioned at all,” and
• 50% said, “It will be mentioned, but tangentially.” 

No one picked the other option which was, “It will be front and center.” 

So, who was right? 

Read the whole post to find the writer's answer, I wish more of the heath care reform debate was based on thoughtful analysis like this.

I hate it when I disagree with myself.
After all, I'm an editor, a writer, a speaker, a mini-pundit. I'm supposed to know what I think.
And then along comes the finding of the Justice Department on the conduct of Jay Bybee and John Yoo whose legal opinions in the Bush years provided legal grounds for torturing prisoners held by the United States. The ethics lawyers in the Office of Professional Responsibility had found that the two men were guilty of "professional misconduct."
That finding was rejected by David Margolis, who issued the final report. He said the two men, while "flawed" did not represent professional misconduct, because, he said, they were working in a time after the attack of 9/11 when the entire context of the law was based on a sense of national urgency and fraught with the passions of the moment.
In effect, he said, while their work may have been done poorly, and may even have been wrong, you have to cut them some slake: it was a difficult time in America.
Now here's where I start to argue with myself.
I have a rule that addresses this very subject: Rule #32. Rule #32 says, "Content isn't king. Context is king."
I am a great believer in context. Context provides the meaning that elevates general information, random observation, facts--but only facts--to the level of significance. Context is how we make sense of the world.
So I agree with Mr. Margolis.
On the other hand, if I buy Mr. Margolis's argument, he's basically saying that it's ok to screw up on things like torture, basic matters of human rights, as long as the times are so urgent that you feel compelled to do it. The problem here, of course, is that the only time these kinds of legal opinions matter is when times are urgent, when civil liberties are on the line. So I disagree with Mr. Margolis: context matters, but in this case the context that matters is that urgent times demand--no require--absolutely scrupulous application of justice. Not convenient legal opinions that cater to the mood of the moment, but virtuous legal opinions that may, in fact, buck the mood of the moment in the larger interest of justice.
So which interpretation of context is the right one?
Does context permit faulty work in the name of urgency?
Or does context require an even higher standard of justice, precisely because so much is at stake?
Now that I think about it, I know what I think; what do you think? You be the judge.