You have to hand it to black pro athletes. They get it. They understand political stakes, and they play for keeps. They could teach a lesson to the rest of us. For three days in August they peacefully shut down the NBA finals and most of the sports world to protest the shooting of Jacob Blake, the black man hit…
“I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.” George Bernard Shaw All he had to do was look presidential. All he had to do was not rise to Trump’s bait. All he had to do to respond to President Trump’s lies was to say, every time, “That is simply not true.” Then…
In our town’s municipal election, I voted by email, from 4,000 miles away. It was simple, and I have no fear that my vote was discarded, intercepted or altered in any way. Alaska trails the rest of the nation in many areas – social advances, public education, and plumbing to name only a few – but the Last Frontier figured…
Nine years ago, I was in Reims, France on a bicycle. I’d sat in a restaurant with a bottle of champagne and a plate of escargot until after dark, but I still wanted to glimpse the town’s famous cathedral, a giant and historic one where French kings were coronated for 1,000 years. The streets were empty and the cathedral closed,…
Because newspapers broker in ideas and also stir the political pot, they attract all manner of hell-raisers, free-thinkers, marginal literary types, crackpots, cranks, wits, half-wits, intellectuals, pseudo-intellectuals, highballs and goofballs. And that’s just the reporting staff. Then there are the hangers-on, the sources, interlopers and news junkies who frequent newsrooms. They seem never to get enough of the drama and…
For a snapshot of our town’s culture, you can’t beat high school graduation. It’s arguably the town’s happiest night, marking at least partial completion if not outright success at the most important thing we do around here – raise and educate young people. How we choose to celebrate is constantly evolving, providing a reflection of who we are and what…
Oh, those Michiganders and their angry protest against the COVID-19 lockdown. I want to say to them, I’m with you. No, not like that. I’m not with their crazy conspiracy theories and their anti-government paranoia and their macaroni-and-cheese-fueled brain functioning. I’m with them to say, “Yes. You are humans, too. You are bat-shit crazy, but so is most of the…
His cringe-worthy press conferences during the corona crisis have underscored everything that’s wrong with the Trump presidency: His errors, his lies, his exaggerations, his unpreparedness, his unfocused, garbled, stream-of-consciousness meandering and his naked self-promotion. As some wag remarked, “He sounds like a kid giving a book report who didn’t read the book.” What makes it a spectacle is that while…
Pizza Joe was closing in on 30, way past the age of knowing better when he decided to jump the duck pond in his southern Ohio hometown of Cambridge. Perhaps, like so many guys who grew up riding spider bikes and watching daredevil Evel Knievel jump buses and cars and fountains on a motorcycle, Joe figured it would be fun.…
Remember back in October when we had a national debate over whether it was okay to “boo” Donald Trump when he showed up at the World Series? The hand-wringers and apologists said booing the president was “bad form” and that we needed to “respect the dignity of the office,” as though the office of president somehow exists separately from the…