One more article about how much we need sleep, and I will scream until dawn. We must have, they all insist, at least seven hours every night. Or we will lose our minds and die. There is, no doubt, some truth in this bossy advice. But I have struggled with insomnia since […]
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. When a Russian naval vessel, said to be the cruiser Moskva, demanded their surrender in the first day of […]
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 most American techno-capitalist space, the drive-thru window. I was like a […]
We all know how propaganda works, how deliberately chosen words become cogs in our war machines, whipping up certain emotions on purpose. But we forget how subtly those word choices can play out, and sometimes we cooperate unwittingly. Israel “occupied” East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights after the 1967 war, for example, […]
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 […]
We go cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, laugh at old Road Runner cartoons (road runners being cuckoos) and coo over the von Trapp children as they sing about cuckoo clocks. Yet we shudder at the subtext of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and associate cuckoos with deception and cuckoldry. Does any creature […]
One woman buys a lottery ticket every day—even when her utilities are about to be cut off. She has already planned exactly how she will spend the money. “At least she still has her dreams,” someone murmurs, and I want to scream. Another friend whips up a new business scheme or an alternate […]
1. The Obsessed Raider of the Lost Black Ark When I was a schoolboy, Black History Month was known as Negro History Week. It was celebrated during the week of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, February 12. (I especially liked the month of February as a child because there were two national holidays: […]
Contemplating delicious frivolity, I tell my husband—who is depressed over landfills of excess clothing and its toxic incineration in a remote Chilean desert—that “we might as well fiddle while Rome burns.” “Nero did not fiddle,” Andrew replies absently. He has a penchant for rescuing misunderstood villains; he rendered both Herod and Richard […]
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 mostly propaganda, noncommunication designed to force people into strict […]
