Category Archives: politics

America’s Summer of Discontent

To twist an old joke, what’s worse than a year with a US presidential election? A year with two US presidential elections. On the one hand, thinking about going through two national-level election days in a single calendar year is somewhat mitigated by the fact that our political and infotainment spheres have wrenched us to a point where we’re perpetually in a national election cycle all the time now, as can be easily seen by the cornucopia of news stories about who might run for…

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Loss Upon Loss

Is Learning “Lost” When Kids Are Out of School? (alfiekohn.org) One of the most infuriating aspects of American big business is its seemingly deliberate ignorance of how much better well-rested employees work. Case study after case study in Europe shows how employees who aren’t forced to work as long as Americans in a given week, and who get much more vacation time than what is typical here, not only get a lot more done per hour on the job, but even a lot more done…

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The Thaw

Although last month’s polar vortex wasn’t as difficult to get through as the spell of beyond-frigid weather we had here a couple of years ago, having to deal with a prolonged period of super-cold temperatures was still incredibly difficult. What makes matters worse is that because of the pandemic, I didn’t have to leave my apartment at all during that time, so the cold weather really wasn’t a burden to me on a practical level. Psychologically, though, I couldn’t wait for the polar vortex to…

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The Devil: Himself

I was part of that generation of young people who arguably got to experience Bill Cosby at the best possible time; Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids was still in reruns when I was in my earliest years, and the first years of The Cosby Show started right when I got to watch prime time television on a regular basis. My parents already owned a couple of Cosby’s comedy albums on vinyl, and I kept picking up more of them on cassette tape when I…

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(Cello) Blue

I’ve been struggling to articulate a path forward from this past Wednesday’s events since I started watching the live footage coming from inside the Capitol building on television that afternoon. (I started typing “struggling to make sense of” the events, but that isn’t true because I know exactly how we got to that point as a nation.) This past Sunday night, as I was listening to Music from the Hearts of Space on my hometown public radio station, I still didn’t know what I was…

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