The giant Burning Man structure went up in flames on Labor Day weekend as usual, and I watched it — online. It looked very dramatic and impressive. As the tens of thousands of “BM” attendees gathered around to watch and cheer in person as the smoke and fireworks rose to the sky, it also reminded me of the main reason I don't go up there to witness it all in person.
Posts tagged as “nation”
The great American pianist Cedar Walton died last week at the age of 79 at his home in Brooklyn after a short illness. Like almost all jazz musicians, Walton made his living largely on the…
Labor Day. Time again for politicians and union adherents to praise organized labor. Time again for others to pontificate about the supposed decline and growing irrelevance of unions as they continue to lose members and…
Dr. Sanjay Gupta, neurosurgeon and medical advisor to the masses, doesn’t want to be on the wrong side of history. On August 11 Gupta narrated a “Special Report” on CNN that provided dramatic examples of…
Aside from its winning title, the best material offered up by the documentary film Twenty Feet from Stardom are the musical performances, seen and — more important — heard both in footage of concerts extending…
Traveling by train to Philadelphia, going North, you will pass by Chester, Pennsylvania, a city that has been in decline for more than half a century. Founded in 1682, the same year as Philadelphia, Chester…
Sixty years ago this week the “forgotten war” came to an inconclusive end. The Korean war was perfectly mistimed for me. On 25 June 1950, the day I graduated from the University of California, Los…
Having gorged unsustainably on the public sector of Michigan’s largest city for decades, having left empty schools, libraries, and office buildings like gnawed bones scattered about a massacre, having erased whole city services leaving only…