Archive
‘Leave’ Them Alone
This time of year, your trees are sending you a message. Although I grew up in the Midwest, I'm experiencing it anew. After spending eight blissful years in California, I've returned to a state where people wear hats shaped like cheese and where leaves turn colors and...
No Exit Strategy
The Outgoing Texas Ag Commissioner’s Red Meat Agenda
In Texas, not all goobers are produced by peanut farmers. A bumper crop of some of our nuttiest goobers comes out of far-right-wing political soil. Check out this blue-ribbon specimen: Todd Staples. Carefully cultivated by corporate agribusiness powers, he's served as...
In OtherWords: October 8, 2014
This week in OtherWords, Sarah Anderson invokes the Three Stooges to put some rich news on runaway CEO pay into perspective and Peter Hart says that big media outlets are engaging in a new form of climate denial. Do you want to make sure you don’t miss the latest from...
It Takes a Mentor
As high school seniors start to churn out their college applications, elite campuses are trying to catch the attention of high-achieving and gifted low-income students around the country. It may be hard to believe, but schools like Harvard University and Amherst...
The Media’s New Climate Denial
What planet does Big Media think it's living on? Over 300,000 people filled the streets of New York City in September as part of the worldwide People's Climate March, a stirring call for action on global warming. But if you watched TV news that day, you may not have...
Olive Garden Execs Parachute Away
Imagine the Three Stooges as waiters. Curly's pouring hot soup in laps, Moe's sneezing in the spaghetti, and Larry's lighting a well-coiffed woman's hair on fire with the bananas flambé. When their boss finally gives them the boot, the customers cheer. And if the...
The Not-So-Good News about the Border Crisis
Did you notice that all that fuss over those Central American kids who were crossing the U.S. border alone suddenly died down? As recently as June, more than 10,000 children fleeing unchecked gang violence in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala made it here over the...
Banning Medical Pot Makes No Sense
A few months back, a friend of mine died of cancer. I'll call her "Karen," for her privacy. By the time we met, she was already terminally ill and had been for months. Over the next year and a half, I watched my friend lose her hair and waste away until I could hardly...
Try to Buy a Baloney Sandwich with That
As an old popular song asks: What do you get if you "work your fingers right down to the bone?" Boney fingers. As housekeepers in the sprawling Marriott hotel chains know, that's more than a cute lyric. It's the truth. These "room attendants," as they're called, are...
