Category: Culture
He Stepped onto the Train and I Just Knew
The following is a true story. Quotations are recorded accurately, to the best of my memory. He stepped onto the train and I just knew. Everyone else in the car knew, too. The tattered clothes....
Thoughts from a journalist on Jeff Bezos buying The Washington Post
You don’t have to work in journalism to care that Jeff Bezos, the head of Amazon, has just laid down a quarter of a billion dollars to purchase The Washington Post. A lot of journalists...
The day I saw real people
There are seven billion people on this planet. We see only the tiniest fraction of them from day to day, and interact with even fewer. That was the premise of a small observational study I...
30 to 1 does not a democracy make
According to the Democracy Index, a project run by the Economist Intelligence Unit, there were nearly 1500 protests in Egypt in July. In the anticipation and aftermath of the removal of former president Mohammed Morsi,...
What Americans should know about Iran’s new president
Iran’s new president-elect, Hassan Rouhani, won a landslide victory in June, collecting more than fifty percent of the vote, more than three times that of the runner-up. He’ll be officially sworn in this weekend. The...
All the science fiction I read was wrong
Everyone knows the basic premise. There’s a problem in the universe and The Big Bad Government is at the heart of it. Star Wars has the sith-ruled Galactic Empire, 1984 has the mind-controlling Big Brother,...
‘Animals Inside Out’ and 10 Facts About the Way Their Bodies Work
You have probably heard of the “Body Worlds” exhibit that travels from museum to museum around the world. If you haven’t, here’s the gist: Cadavers have been stripped of skin to reveal what goes on...
Don’t Boycott ‘Rolling Stone’
The magazine unleashed hellfire by slapping Boston Marathon bombing suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (Rolling Stone identifies him as Jahar), on its cover. In addition to public outrage, especially from Bostonians, big name businesses like CVS, Walgreens, Rite Aid...