Opinion

Walter

Forgive me for the details on this one but I have repeatedly told this story to eighth graders over several years and the veracity of the parts of the story that get…

The Facebook Furor

Are you wondering what the Facebook commotion is about? Here is the situation. It involves United States privacy laws, data mining and manipulation of the masses. What happened? There are allegations that…

Touch Stones

In the pitch dark of the lodge, Miguel pours cold Water on the glowing-red Stone People. They don’t look like people; they look like chunks of black lava, this new batch rounded,…

Wish List

  “And I feel like we don’t often talk about this expectation of martyrdom—that without question, you’re going to be a hero in that situation.” —Sarah Plumitallo, February 24, 2018, NPR, All…

Troll Farms

A whiff of spring this early March day. I long for rich, loamy dirt and a bag of heritage seeds. But forget corn, beans or tomato crops. Today, I am going to…

Gunning for the NRA

Have we finally turned a corner on public tolerance for gun violence and the NRA? Consider this Dishonor Roll: University of Texas, Austin, Texas (1966), 14 people shot dead by “Texas Tower…

One Day Of Peace

There is an old hollowed tree on Valley Road that I would walk by when escorting my children to Children’s Corner Pre-School (where I also worked as a teacher). On the tree,…

Sir William

An opening line from the 1995 film Braveheart warns us that “history is written by those who have hanged heroes.” What follows, then, is intended as a correction to the historical record;…

The High-Tech World of Fake News

In 1968, I went to work as an editor at The Film Group in Chicago. We made commercials for money and documentaries for love. I was a green kid from the suburbs.…

Rain

When the fires hit Los Angeles in December, T-CEP reported that we’d not had rain for 250 days. That was two months ago. I have enough drywall on my faux-wood paneling, enough…