Complicity and Knowledge

Faida Hamdy was a municipal inspector in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia. She was not a very respectful municipal official. So when she found that a young fruit vendor did not have a license, she slapped him. She humiliated him in front of others. The fruit vendor set himself on fire, and this set the Arab wo…

Oxytocin is a hormone released by the hypothalamus portion of the brain which, among other things, makes people trust each other more. In other words, one could argue that local government ethics seeks to increase the release of oxytocin in the brains of people when they think about their local gov…

I recently read a book by Stanley Cavell called Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (2004). Despite its title, it is not about cities; in fact, much of the book uses movies to discuss this Harvard professor's ethical philosophy. What is relevant about this book to g…

It should come as little surprise to people involved in local government that a New York Times article about bullying among ten- and eleven-year-olds has a great deal of relevance. I said for years about my town's government that its major participants were like ten-year-old boys on a playground, t…