Triangle Shirtwaist Fire Remembered After 100 Years (DNAinfo.com) Almost every semester I teach, at some point in the term I have reason to bring up the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland catching fire in the sixties. The reaction from my students is always the same: “What? How can a river catch fire?” When I explain to them how polluted the river was and call up some Google Images photos of the fire, though, they seem to understand. (As I teach in Michigan and nearly all my…
Anger brews over government workers’ benefits (AP via Yahoo! News) It’s hard enough to read political news these days without so many articles containing such mind-bogglingly misinformed statements in the first few paragraphs that they deflate your will to get to the end of the article. You expect that kind of talk from politicians — it’s what they get paid for, and I don’t mean the cheques they draw from the government — but when the “people on the street” who are interviewed for these…
[For those of you who don’t follow my Twitter or Facebook, Mom’s been in the emergency room twice in the past forty-eight hours, first for a slipped disc and painful kidney stone and urinary tract infection, then again because the antibiotic they gave her for her UTI caused her heart to palpitate. She appears to be doing better now, but I’m taking nothing for granted at this point, and needless to say this has me kind of rattled. Not that losing Mom would ever be…
I often talk to my students about the ways in which arguments are framed. Anyone, with enough time and research skills, can find a way to set up an argument that, on its surface, will seem devastating, if not scary. Take, for example, Republican claims in 2004 that Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry was the most liberal member of the Senate — even more liberal than his Massachusetts counterpart, Ted Kennedy — and was thus too radical to become President. Technically Kerry was judged to…
Recently one of my friends sent a tweet out, asking what we, her Twitter followers, thought was the greatest television commercial of all time. As someone who was lucky enough to live through the middle and late 1990s, that last period of popular culture that had so much going for it, my immediate response was the landmark Orlando Jones “Make 7-Up Yours” spots, commercials that endure to this day. Now that I’ve thought longer about it, though, I think there is one commercial that stands…