Archive
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...
Head in the Tar Sands
Revealing Corporate Largesse
Some people have a recurring nightmare of rising to give a speech, but realizing they know nothing about the topic — and then discovering they're naked. It turns out that corporations also have such nightmares. OK, corporations aren't people, no matter what the...
In OtherWords: October 1, 2014
This week in OtherWords, Ryan Alexander questions the wisdom of spending $1.5 trillion on F-35 combat jets and Jill Richardson urges everyone to get hooked on apples. Do you want to make sure you don’t miss the latest from OtherWords? Subscribe to our free weekly...
We Can’t Go On Eating Like This
Once the human race stopped throwing spears and gathering berries, our bodies suffered. Planting seeds and harvesting produce made leisure possible, but it also meant we grew shorter, fatter, sicker, and considerably more overworked. An alien visiting from another...
