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The Vertical Hour was Hare’s next play after Stuff Happens, making the global machinations of the Iraq War and the related decisions and consequences intensely personal. This, too, is a hallmark of Hare’s work. His plays are populated by damaged idealists trying to find a way to live right in a world of broken and corrupt institutions, but they are never content to offer just one view — even if the playwright himself passionately holds one opinion.

Working to bridge the political left and right, or at least to locate the places where they overlap, is a core component of his work, and specifically of The Vertical Hour

“I was very interested in the position of the pro-war liberals. They had a very strong moral case for intervention. It was part of something that had been building up over the previous 10 or 15 years in Africa, in Yugoslavia, where a whole lot of well-intentioned liberals came to believe that the West had a moral duty to intervene when there was great deal of suffering. Although I was against the war, I could see that there was a virtuous case.”

By all accounts, these programmers turned entrepreneurs believed their lofty words and were at first indifferent to getting rich from their ideas. A 1998 paper by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, then computer-science graduate students at Stanford, stressed the social benefits of their new search engine, Google, which would be open to the scrutiny of other researchers and wouldn’t be advertising-driven.

The Google prototype was still ad-free, but what about the others, which took ads? Mr. Brin and Mr. Page had their doubts: “We expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”

He was concerned about them as young students lacking perspective about life and was worried that these troubled souls could be our new leaders. Neither Mr. Weizenbaum nor Mr. McCarthy mentioned, though it was hard to miss, that this ascendant generation were nearly all white men with a strong preference for people just like themselves. In a word, they were incorrigible, accustomed to total control of what appeared on their screens. “No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful,” Mr. Weizenbaum wrote, “has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or a field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops.”

inking the different Areas of Knowledge (AOK) with different Ways of Knowing (WOK) can be quite challenging at times. I now attempted to link History with Language, Logics, Emotion and Sense Perception.

Does the way (the language) that certain historical events are presented in history books influence the way that the reader understands these events? What role does loaded language play when talking about historical events? What role do connotation and denotation play when talking about historical events? How can language introduce bias into historical accounts? How does language help or hinder the interpretation of historical facts?

recently read an interesting poem by the German poet and playwright Berthold Brecht – a poem which got me thinking. You see, this is one of the TOK illnesses, you start to see TOK everywhere, and also in poetry. Continue reading »

It may seem strange that a man who co-founded two thriving civil-rights organizations, was an Oscar-nominated screenwriter and a Pulitzer-finalist playwright, wrote a best-selling novel that has remained in print for more than 40 years, and had his play become a successful film 30 years after it was written would consider himself a failure, but Kramer has long been consistent on the point. “I am very cognizant of a great failing on my part,” he told the oral historian Eric Marcus in 1989: “that I did not have the ability to be a leader, that I did not have the ability to deal with my adversaries and still be friends.”

Having perceived himself as a failure, was Kramer proud of his accomplishments? “I feel well used, how’s that?” he said. “I’m proud of my organizations. GMHC is now thriving in a way it didn’t for a bunch of years.

“In the case of ACT UP, which I’m exceedingly proud of having founded, it was based on love and fear. You know, earlier on people said, ‘You’ll scare everybody to death. And I said, ‘Good. ‘Cause you should be afraid, because it’s frightening.’’”