BY Larry Calloway In the last half of his 30 years representing New Mexico in the U.S. Senate Jeff Bingaman saw dysfunction of Congress go tactical and political, beginning in 1995 under then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich and continuing under Mitch McConnell whenever he was Senate majority leader. Both are Republicans.  Bingaman is a Democrat. “Breakdown,” […]

The Dec. 5 (2020) New Yorker has drawn attention to Pekka Hamalainen, the Danish scholar of American Indian policy. Here is my review of his first book, “Lakota America.”       Along T-shirt row in Deadwood, the gold-gulch town in South Dakota’s Black Hills, you can read silk-screened homages to bikers, gunfighters, gamblers, anti-immigrant […]

  I recall the day at St. John’s College Santa Fe when news reached the Western world that the Taliban had blown up the two standing Buddhas carved in a cliff in the Bamiyan valley of Afghanistan. We had been reading Buddhist literature as part of the graduate Eastern Classics program, and as we took […]

The neo-cons in the George W. Bush administration never documented what they owed to Leo Strauss. All I recall is that they claimed to have been students of philosophy under the brilliant refugee from Nazi Germany.  By mere association with these U.S. politicians he has been “accused,” according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, of […]

BARUCH SPINOZA in his youth suffered a thorough cursing by the elders of his Amsterdam synagogue, and 365 years later they’re still at it.  The original writ against the 23-year-old rabbinical dropout, who would grow to become the foremost philosopher of liberal democracy in the new world of scientific thinking, was presented at the Amsterdam […]

WOOD-FIRED open-air cremation is the way to go in Crestone, Colorado.  I distinctly remember four of these lawful funerals held in a circular sanctuary on a hill on the sandy side of the San Luis Valley, below the highest of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. It always begins in the stillness before dawn. Two of […]

    THE MILLENNIUM  began at midnight in Australia with a blazing word on the Sydney harbor bridge: “Eternity” in a flowing script called copperplate. What was it supposed to mean? By then Aussies — but few of the global TV watchers —  knew the story behind it.  There was a writer — Arthur Stace […]

In the golf comedy “Caddyshack” Bill Murray, playing the blundering groundskeeper, brags:  “I caddied for the Dalai Lama.”  Doug Preston, a Santa Fe writer, can say, “I rode a ski lift with the Dalai Lama.”  But it’s no laff line. It’s true.  His reminiscence in Slate releases a flood of links on Google if you […]