John Samuel Tieman: What happens after the riots end?
Are we radicalizing a whole generation? When I was in Vietnam, a near-by artillery unit called a cease-fire. Somebody realized they were shelling the wrong coordinates. A private said, “I … Continue reading
Patricia A. Nugent: In Government Service
I’ve never much cared for him. When I go to the post office, I always hope I’ll get someone else behind the counter. This young government worker never smiles and … Continue reading
Mel Packer: Is It Time To Be Outlaws Again?
Only large-scale civil disobedience will make our leaders address economic injustice. In 1989, Bob Dylan recorded a song titled “Everything Is Broken”. That song seemed to go largely ignored, perhaps … Continue reading
Gail Langstroth: Muzungu, Muzungu!
Muzungu, Muzungu! Children scream as they touch my white skin and run. Muzungu, Muzungu! December, 2012, I am in Nakuusi, Uganda, a small African village, population 180. Early each morning … Continue reading
Fred J. Abrahams: Jerzy in the City
Remembering Jerzy Kozinski It was the heyday of Disco in New York; the era of the Peppermint Lounge and Studio 54. Nightclubs and bars of all descriptions popped up every … Continue reading
Jose Padua: That Point Where Age and Confusion Approach the Meaning of the Universe
I wonder, sometimes, what difference it would have made if, in my younger years I had gotten the foundation of my education in the art of film solely by renting … Continue reading
Djelloul Marbrook: Don’t Believe the Libel that Poets Don’t Engage in Politics
Watching, we won’t see leaves break through the smooth finality of surface. This strophe from Rusty Morrison’s poem, “History of Seed,”* explains to a wondrous extent the way we are beguiled … Continue reading
What Did You Do During the War, Dad?:
Reminisces of the War to End All Wars My father was wounded in the war, the First World War. I often saw the small pink, half-moon shaped scar when we … Continue reading
Let’s Hear It for Ball-Busting Poetry About a World Men Have Ruined!
Let’s have dangerous, trouble-making, side-sinister, cantankerous, mean poetry. Let`s have pure-damn evil poetry. Looking out my kitchen window, having watched a red-tailed hawk stoop and carry off a baby rabbit, … Continue reading
Howard Jacobson: Let’s see the ‘criticism’ of Israel for what it really is
Emotions have run high over recent events in Gaza. And in this impassioned and searching essay, our writer argues that just below the surface runs a vicious strain of ancient … Continue reading
Ruth Fowler: The risk of opposing Israel in the US
Today, as a woman of mixed Christian and Jewish background living in the United States, I do not feel free to express an opinion about the Gaza conflict without facing … Continue reading
Mel Packer: Coal Miners Are Mad…and Scared. And they have a right to be.
In 1968, the Mannington Mine in Farmington WV owned by Consol Coal, caught fire, blew up, and 78 miners were buried, many likely alive. In 1972, a Consol mine in … Continue reading
Dan Simpson: Fracking Compromises the Future of Pennsylvania
I guess that having lived in the Ohio-Pennsylvania-West Virginia tri-state area for decades of my life should have hardened me to the apparently popular concept that it is completely acceptable … Continue reading
Djelloul Marbrook: The Tunnels of Gaza Thwarted Alexander the Great
The Five Ws of 19th Century journalism fall far short of the demands of 21st Century journalism and yet they remain the effective diktat of newsrooms. Let me show you … Continue reading →