Archive
Belgian Awful
The ISIS supporters who attacked Brussels killed more than 30 people and injured hundreds more. Bombings at the city’s airport and a subway station blew up the notion that measures taken after the Paris siege were keeping Europe safe. The scariest part of this story...
Dying in Prison
Over the past three decades, judges and juries have filled America's prisons with non-violent offenders. Many are serving draconian sentences for first-time offenses. Indeed, while only about 5 percent of the world’s people live in the United States, our country is...
What’s ‘Processed’ Food?
If you've read any nutritional advice lately, you've probably encountered one hard-and-fast rule: Avoid processed foods. But what does "processed" mean? On one level, anything humans do to food — slicing fruit, cooking beans, fermenting cabbage into sauerkraut —...
NBA: The National Billboard Association?
Billboards must be living creatures, for they appear to propagate like breeding rabbits. They spread everywhere, growing to enormous sizes while shouting corporate messages at us. Some even watch and track us with their digital eyes. Now, though, rather than...
A Nuclear Juggling Act
The Great American Plane Robbery
If you take the word "free" and rip the "r" out of it, what do you get? Two things, actually: You get a "fee" — and then you get mad. This is happening to millions of airline passengers who are discovering that the advertised price of a ticket isn't the half of it....
Heil Trump
In OtherWords: March 16, 2016
This week in OtherWords, John Kiriakou explains why it's important to take Donald Trump's vitriol seriously, I point out that the GOP's front-runner will probably wind up being a huge loser, and Lindsay Suter tells his personal fossil fuel divestment story. If you...
A Curbside Crisis
Do you cross the street to put your soda can in the recycling bin or avidly pluck plastics and paper from your neighbor's trash cans? The current state of recycling in the United States may surprise you. It’s in trouble for many reasons, including two straightforward...
Hillary Clinton’s Grim Legacy in Honduras
Who murdered Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres? While the identities of the killers remain unknown, activists, media observers, and members of the Cáceres family are blaming the increasingly reactionary and violent Honduran government. The authorities had...