So I’m trying to make a pot of chili. Because i like to make my life difficult, I made most of the chili Tuesday and then put it in the fridge so that the flavors would meld or deepen or do whatever they do. My plan tonight was to add the beans and actually eat […]
Voters in six Wisconsin state senate districts voted in recall elections last night. The recall movement was triggered when newly-elected Governor Scott Walker and the state legislature pushed through a law that stripped members of Wisconsin’s public-sector unions of many of their collective-bargaining rights. All six seats were held by Republicans. If Democrats could win […]
I’m writing this on my laptop in the middle of the second power outage of the evening. Hopefully I’ll get power back so that I can connect to the Internet and posit it before midnight, but either way I’m going to count my post-every-day streak as intact. We have enough candles to see in the […]
I may be repeating myself here. If so, consider it an added bit of meta-commentary, because I think the time is right for this conversation again. In the last ten to twenty years, the reboot has joined the remake as a source for new programming. Serialized stories, from TV shows to movie series to comic […]
Last week Chris Lehmann wrote about a school he’d like to see: Every morning, the first thing everyone did was read the New York Times for an hour. Now, imagine that they are using some kind of Kindle-style software so that they can annotate with ideas, questions, etc… such that at the end of the […]
Natalie Munroe is a teacher in the Philadelphia suburbs. She also has a blog. Last year, it was discovered that she had posted disparaging comments about her students on her blog. She was suspended and then went on maternity leave. Now she’s getting ready to come back to work, and let’s just say that bygones […]
I am just barely making it to Day 5 of my renewed posting regimen – I have a headache that’s stopping me from putting together the post I had in mind for today, but I think it’s a good occasion to take a look at the site’s current form and see what I think. More […]
A lot of people have used the metaphor of someone taking hostages to describe political standoffs such as the one that just took place over the debt ceiling or the one that just appears to have ended regarding the Federal Aviation Administration. One side (usually the Republicans) says that unless their desired policies are implemented, […]
I am late to the party here, I know. The Internet chorus rendered its verdict on Green Lantern at the same time that audiences did, the former with an abundance of snark and the latter with an abundance of not-being-in-the-theater. But after 30 years as a DC fanboy, I think I have reached a breaking […]
One thing I’ve frequently wondered about is why poor and middle-class voters don’t use the power of their numbers to overcome the upper class’s power of money. Why wouldn’t the lower 80% of the wealth scale favor public officials and policies that would redistribute wealth from the top 20%? The recent showdown over the debt […]