A fixed surveillance camera, recording in Cleveland on November 22, 2014, captured a 12-year-old African-American boy, Tamir Rice, pointing a toy gun at imaginary targets. The boy was playing alone in a snowy park pavilion…
Posts tagged as “essays”
The staggering incoherence of the election campaign only mirrors the shocking incapacity of the American public, from top to bottom, to process the tendings of our time. The chief tending is permanent worldwide economic contraction.…
So it’s Friday and I’m having one of those mornings where I feel certain the universe is an all-powerful sentient being picking on me for no good reason. Put another way, I’m feeling sorry for…
“Adults should face the fact that they don't like adolescents,” wrote Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, shortly after the Columbine school shooting in 1999, “and that they have used high school to isolate the…
London — Like the Brits themselves the weather on the last weekend of the BBC Proms—the biggest and longest-running music festival in the world—couldn’t make up its mind. Blistering temperatures gave way to humid showers.…
You should never refuse a friend a favor, I thought to myself. You ought always be one upon whom counting can be done, like an abacus or the common hand. The lists to which your…
Wounded Knee. Enough said? Reason enough to be going to Washington DC to see the new National Museum of the American Indian. Not that the massacre history of the tribes in the museum's historic intent,…
Mr. Johnson was the reason I wrote “Chemistry” when asked to fill in the blank entitled “Major: ____” in the fall of 1962 when enrolling at Fresno State College. Mr. Johnson was my highly entertaining…
When they turn the attack dogs on you, you know that you’ve won…morally. Of course, moral victories aren’t worth much in the short term. All too often the price of a moral victory is to…