Abby Zimet: Man Made Borders On This Earth
Last Wednesday, 31-year-old Alonso Guillén, a Lufkin, Texas Dreamer, construction worker and weekend disc jockey known as DJ Ocho, left work with two friends and a small borrowed boat, driving … Continue reading
W.H. Auden: September 1, 1939
“We must love one another or die.” Today W.H. Auden’s poem September 1, 1939 resonates more than ever. First published in The New Republic in October 1939, it marks the … Continue reading
Abby Zimet: What We Do — Jane Austen’s Tenner
On Tuesday’s 200th anniversary of the death of Jane Austen – 1775-1817 – U.K. officials unveiled their new £10 banknote featuring “the mother of the great tradition of the English … Continue reading
Abby Zimet: Too Many Getting Shooted, Still
Sorry, but the bleak news keeps coming. Friday, another white cop got away with another murder of a black man, the third such travesty in about a month. Ray Tensing’s … Continue reading
Abby Zimet: The Way Forward
Declaring, “We choose love,” thousands gathered in Portland, Oregon on Saturday night to honor three victims of a savage hate crime on a local train, the pernicious, inexorable dross of … Continue reading
Abby Zimet: Black Mamas Bailout Day — Because All Of Us Are Fallen
Citing the tradition of their enslaved ancestors to “free ourselves,” a coalition of 25 grassroots, black-led organizations bought the freedom of about 60 black women jailed around the country for … Continue reading
Abby Zimet: We are a pre-existing condition
Gone is that loathsome sea of smug, suited, doughy, self-righteous, chortling, older white men in the Rose Garden gleefully celebrating the “moral travesty” of passing a billionaires’ tax cut bill … Continue reading
Michael Simms: The Daily Disaster of Donald Trump
With a vote of 217-213, the House of Representatives voted on Thursday to pass Trumpcare and strip health coverage from 24 million Americans. The new program will undermine the health, … Continue reading
Abby Zimet: Tweets of the Master Class — And Ten Dollars Extra, For Every Hundred Lashes
“Stop the Runaway” begins an 1804 ad placed in the Tennessee Gazette urging civic-minded souls to capture a “Mulatto Man Slave” escaped from one Andrew Jackson, “unrepentant”owner of 161 slaves, … Continue reading
Abby Zimet: Unpredictable. Unhinged. Dangerous — On Losing An Armada and Other Acts of Shocking Ignorance
If you haven’t been following the Strangelovian Korea debacle – so many debacles, so little time – it’s still, alas, unfolding thanks to our utterly clueless loser-in-chief and his historically … Continue reading
Abby Zimet: Time of Useful Consciousness
A belated 98th birthday to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, indefatigable poet, bookseller, anti-Fascist, First Amendment activist, environmentalist, publisher, painter, creator of community, patron saint of the Beat artists, Poet Laureate of San … Continue reading
Abby Zimet: Trump and Putin Great Leaders, Yes?
We’ll Take Our Comic Relief Where We Can Get It Dept: The ghastliness of the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conclave and Herr Trump’s abject nightmare of a speech was … Continue reading
Abby Zimet: Ideas As Dangerous As Bullets
Among the latest ungodly alternative facts issuing like toxic fumes from the White House is their brazenly skewed (and woefully misspelled) list of terror attacks the media allegedly failed to … Continue reading
Abby Zimet: The Hottest Places In Hell
The crowds of protesters turning up “loud and present” outside courthouses Tuesday to protest Supreme Court choice Neil Gorsuch were not the only people fiercely opposing the flood of atrocities … Continue reading
