Archive
Don’t Put a Fork in It
While most Americans were enjoying the holiday season or stressing out over the nation's imminent leap off the so-called fiscal cliff, the Food and Drug Administration delivered some big news as quietly as possible. On December 21, the agency announced that...
Dumped by Time Warner Cable
Time Warner Cable's decision to drop Al Jazeera English from its lineup, right after AJE had purchased Current TV and that network's carriage deals for $500 million, raised questions about the cable operator's motives. But whatever the particulars and politics of this...
Obama’s Battle Hymn of the Republic
I don't think President Barack Obama gave a good inaugural address this time. I think it was a great one. He began with the principles of freedom and equality that inform our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, and followed our journey through the many...
Hogging the Global Pie
Apologists for inequality have a standard retort to anyone who calls for a more equal distribution of the world's treasure. If you took all the wealth of the wealthy and divvied it up equally among all the poor, they claim, no one would gain enough to accomplish much...
Fat Demons
My grandmother lay in bed at a hospice facility, days away from death. With her loving children by her side, she looked at her belly and — as she had done for all of the years I'd known her — complained that she was too fat. What? What did she think six-pack abs would...
Step Away from That Desk
Do you eat lunch at your desk? Alone? Continuing to work as you chew? Welcome to the new wondrous world of work in which employees feel intense pressure from bosses to labor right through lunch. In a survey, 62 percent of people with desk jobs said they grab a snack...
Uttering the G Word
Wow. In his second inaugural speech, President Barack Obama finally sounded like the guy progressives thought would be governing the United States starting in 2009. If he puts those poetic words into action, he may leave a much stronger legacy after eight years than...
Fishy Genes
Why I’m Singing the Inauguration Blues
President Barack Obama's second inauguration definitely had its high points: his uncharacteristically liberal speech, weather that broke 30 degrees, and a tour-de-force from inaugural poet Richard Blanco. This was my first barely-up-close-and-not-so-personal...
This Week in OtherWords: January 23, 2013
This week in OtherWords, Ron Carver puts today's gun control debate into a personal and historical context, drawing on his experience on the front lines of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and research into what prompted the Founders to enshrine the right to...
