The N-word appears sparingly in James, Percival Everett’s 2024 novel that reinvents the escaped slave narrative while it recycles Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a classic set in the antebellum American South where…
Posts published by “Jonah Raskin”
Imperialism was a loaded word, a most unsavory word, in academia in the U.S. in the 1960s when I wrote a Ph.D. thesis about Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad titled “The Mythology of Imperialism.” I…
“Chicken in the car and the car can’t go, that’s how you spell Chicago.” I heard that jingle when I was a boy and have never forgotten it. I’m writing this on the cusp of…
Tim Walz, the Governor of Minnesota and Kamala Harris’s running mate, gave new meaning to an old word when he called Trump and Co, “weird.” Leave it to a high school teacher and a football…
The recent stories about Tim Walz — the governor of Minnesota, and Kamala Harris’s running mate — which have emphasized his days as a football coach, reminded me of my years as an athlete who…
The patients in Dr. Wenwu Jin's fifth-floor office on Clay Street in San Francisco's Chinatown are almost all elderly Chinese men and women. I'm one of the few exceptions: a white guy who doesn't speak…
The Brits have them, the French have them and so do the Swedes and the Poles. All Europeans have cop dramas and police procedurals that reflect their national identities, many of them on Netflix, PBS…