Dear Dr. Zack, Please help me, as I am about to lose my mind, or what's left of it. For the past few years, instead of people saying “First of all ... Secondly, thirdly, fourthly…
Posts published in “Essays”
Raj Patel's first book, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, can be read as a ten-chapter exegesis on the ills of global capitalism, as manifested by its gut-wrenching stranglehold over…
To live. Sounds easy enough in practice. Wake up. Eat. Work. Play. Love yourself. Love people around you. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. "My parents told me if I went to college, got married and had kids,…
Date: March 15, 2011. Location: Mendocino County Board of Supervisors Meeting, Ukiah. Subject: The Mendocino County Museum’s declining budget. * * * Board Chair Kendall Smith: Well, I believe— Supervisor John McCowen: Madam Chair. Smith:…
Americans read the increasingly panic-stricken reports of deepening catastrophe at Fukushima Daiichi, speed to the pharmacy to look for iodine and ask, “It’s happened there; can it happen here?” They already know it can, and…
Tooch Colombo isn’t like me, most of my friends and family members. When he wants to eat meat he doesn’t go shopping at Safeway or Whole Foods. At the age of 75, he goes for…
While president of Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson asked a group of alumni a provocative question: Would Abraham Lincoln have been a better president if he had been college-educated? Wilson answered his own question with a…
In 1967, there was a concert in Pittsburgh, with the Grateful Dead, the Velvet Underground, the Fugs and me, playing the part of a stand-up satirist. There were two shows, both completely sold out, and…
The tumultuous managerial shakeup at National Public Radio headquarters for trivial verbal miscues once again has highlighted the ludicrous corporatist right-wing charge that public radio and public TV are replete with left-leaning or leftist programming.…