Archive
Buy a Box of Cereal, Waive Your Rights Goodbye
Buying a cell phone plan could make you powerless to sue your phone company if it defrauds you. Using a coupon to buy a box of cereal may mean you give up your right to sue if the food is tainted. Checking your grandmother into a nursing home could prevent you from...
Derailing the High-Speed Trading Bullet Train Before It Crashes Our Economy
On the afternoon of May 6, 2010, the Dow Jones Industrial Average suffered its fastest nosedive ever. Within minutes, a trillion dollars in wealth went "poof." What happened? What actually set it off remains in dispute. Yet we do know that high-frequency traders,...
Brown’s Bittersweet Legacy
What a bittersweet 60th anniversary: On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling declared "separate but equal" school systems inherently unconstitutional. After making great progress toward integrating public schools, our nation...
The Unbearable Annoyance of Neighborhood Tattling
I met my friend Rachel because we were both in the same situation: We each had neighbors who inexplicably hated our chickens. Rachel and I each had small flocks of hens, no roosters, and sprawling, fertile, organic vegetable gardens in our yards. And we live in urban...
The Pentagon’s Great Pizza Victory
From the Gatling gun to the nuclear bomb, from hot air balloons to drones, the military has enlisted scientists to develop ever-more effective war technologies. Now comes a long-sought scientific breakthrough that the military brass consider the ultimate advantage for...
Supreme Court Evolution
Smart Glasses Won’t Magnify Rick Perry’s Brain
Rick "Oops" Perry is back, pitching himself for another presidential run. This time, he's sporting eyeglasses. What fun. Who can forget the Texas governor's nationally televised pratfall during a 2011 presidential debate, when he couldn't remember the third federal...
This Week in OtherWords: April 23, 2014
This week in OtherWords, Marjorie Elizabeth Wood explains how taxpayers help foot the cost of massive pay packages for restaurant-industry execs who lobby against raising the minimum wage and Jim Hightower weighs in on the latest skirmish in the war on voting. Do you...
A Disappointing TV Breakthrough
I'm legally blind. Like most blind people, I don't take cars for test drives, chop down trees with a chainsaw, or keep my blindness a secret. You wouldn't know this from watching the new NBC show, Growing Up Fisher, a TV show about a blind lawyer named Mel and his...
Fasting to Pierce the Silence from Congress on Immigration
"My deportation date is April 18," I overheard a woman say next to me in the large white tent where we were both fasting. Due to a simple miscommunication with her lawyer, Lupita received a deportation order that now threatens to send her back to a country she has not...
