Archive
Paying for Corporate Crime on the Taxpayer’s Dime
Sometimes, a news story can be so crammed with irony that it boggles the mind. Consider just the headline on one such story that ran recently in my town's daily paper: "Man gets 10 years for defrauding banks." That just screams for a rewrite, doesn't it? I yearn for a...
Why Politicians Shouldn’t Fear Getting an F from the NRA
As plenty of unarmed Americans have deduced, our gun-toting brethren live in a propaganda-induced nightmare world. They envision armed, foul-smelling villains either breaking into their snug homes or menacing them on the street. In response, our gunslingers plan to...
Fixing Social Security
These Rhinos Need Their Own Guns
Have you ever heard of the rabbit hunter's nightmare?A guy dreams that he and a few of his buddies have fanned out across some brushland to scare-up and shoot a few hares. They kill a couple, but then, one of the hunting buddies who'd headed down a slope into a...
Reading between the Links
As an aspiring writer and avid reader, I never miss the annual Library of Congress National Book Festival on the National Mall. This year, the best part was seeing one of my favorite authors, Margaret Atwood. Atwood, author of The Blind Assassin, The Handmaid's Tale,...
This Week in OtherWords: November 6, 2013
This week in OtherWords, Sam Pizzigati, William A. Collins, and I point out that this is no time to slash the food stamp program and Jill Richardson explains how a gusher of corporate cash appears to have killed a food-labeling initiative in Washington State. Donald...
A Reason to Party Like It’s 1989
These days, you can get the feeling the Cold War never ended. Le Carré-style intrigue has, it turns out, barely skipped a beat. The 9/11 attacks injected the U.S. spymaster apparatus with steroids. But 23 years ago this week, the Cold War did end. I don't remember...
Caving on Immigration
This was supposed to be Marco Rubio's big year. Back in February, the junior senator from Florida made the cover of Time magazine — billed as "The Republican Savior." The supposedly rising star was proclaiming himself ready to lead on the thorny issue of immigration....
Redefining Heroism
More then a few veterans, myself included, are troubled by the way Americans observe Veterans Day. Originally called Armistice Day, and intended by Congress in 1926 to "perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations," the holiday has...
The Dark Side of Internships
This is my fifth unpaid internship. I've worked for non-profit organizations that couldn't have afforded to pay me and a fancy magazine that could. Some were worth it, others weren't. But I accepted each one with the same sense of desperation and vulnerability....
