Crossing color, class, gender, and generational lines, the communities of addiction and recovery are as democratic as America gets. Twelve-step meetings are in fact downright radical: nonprofit and nonhierarchical, with a fierce etiquette of listening to and caring about everyone who wanders into the rooms.

Every intelligent child is an amateur anthropologist. The first thing such a child notices is that adults don't make sense.

Addiction may be something to which some of us are predisposed, like diabetes, rather than a voluntary behavior - but it's also reversible. A 'disease model' o…

Run from the Furies, and they find you, as if fear were a homing device, as if literature itself, on contemplating the abyss, were an invitation to jump into i…

Disco is the best floor show in town. It's very democratic, boys with boys, girls with girls, girls with boys, blacks and whites, capitalists and Marxists, Chi…

It is human life you value isn't it? Not its worth. Just human life. As if it were gold and could be neither good nor bad nor worth more nor worth less but mus…

As free citizens in a political democracy, we have a responsibility to be interested and involved in the affairs of the human community, be it at the local or …