Screenshot from video said to be shot by Snake Island guards, on social media The bravery and devotion to duty of the small State Border Guard Service garrison on Snake [Zmiinyi] Island, an outpost of Ukrainian territorial boundaries in the Black Sea, has been much on social media.
Courtesy Corey Coyle, CC 3.0 Unported For a time, back in the Reagan-Bush era, I was a teen employee in a Hardee’s in coal country. By incompetence I had failed upward, away from the fry station and off the backline, to work the front counter, and then that…
Borders are curious things. They change. Those who benefit claim that the new borders are set in stone; those who lose claim the old borders were set in stone. And in time, the borders will change again, perhaps benefiting a third party.
In 1962 Michael Harrington’s "The Other America: Poverty in the United States" was published. It was truly one of those remarkable books that fundamentally changed the nature of the debate. Like Rachel Carson’s "Silent Spring" published the same year, it managed to draw attention to a significant but largely unrecognized threat to the country.
Even carved in wood, the cuckoo is a mess of contradictions. The man credited for inventing it in 1730 was not even born until four years later, and there is a description of a mechanical cuckoo that dates to 1629. Though the classic Swiss chalet version of the cuckoo clock is now iconic, the first popularizations were made in Germany’s Black Forest and bore hunting scenes.
A daydream is like a pill we pop to numb our misery. It pushes us from a grim present into a sunshiny future—one that is not likely to materialize. Yet there we stay, for as long as we possibly can, luxuriating in fake warmth.
This was a hard lesson. But I was not traumatized by it. I had learned enough from Negro History Week to know that there were Black people who had it a lot tougher and had learned harder lessons in a harder way. They soldiered on. I would not be much of a Black person if I let something like this really get me down.
Nero was loved by soldiers and commoners but deeply resented by the Roman aristocracy. The stories about Nero were recorded years after his death—by suicide, at the age of thirty, when the Roman Senate declared him a public enemy. By the time his life was written, politics was being adjusted to favor a different dynastic line.
Courtesy Piqsels, CC0 1.0 When you speak with someone on the street, you usually know relatively quickly when they are self-interested, when they do not have answers, when they are delusional, stalling, or wandering off topic. That is, when they are full of it. Similarly, corporate communication is…
In 2018, the Bureau of Labor Statistics informed us that we were spending about fifteen minutes a day reading for pleasure—and two hours and fifty minutes watching tv. In 2021, the tv total had risen to more than three hours a day. Reading was no longer even measured.