Making Sausage
In The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket (2020), “hands-on investigative journalist” Benjamin Lorr peels back that thin layer of…
Long Division
A podcast series titled To See Each Other focuses on the activities of politically progressive organizations throughout the country that were absolutely floored by the…
A Voting Rights Déjà Vu
Ari Berman’s Give Us the Ballot (2015) documents the history of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Berman’s book begins with the great struggle to…
The Gaia Principle
Now streaming on Netflix, the film Kiss the Ground is a visually delightful documentary promoting a healthier interaction between humans and the earth. The goal…
Hugging Trees
By the time Jared Diamond published Collapse in 2005, he was ranked as one of the leading public intellectuals in the world; which is my…
Go East Young Man!
A quote often attributed to newspaperman Horace Greeley circa 1840, “Go West Young Man” evokes images of pioneers, wagon trains, the Oregon Trail, and the…
Watch Your Step
One of my earliest experiences with the internet was a demonstration made by a colleague named Archie, who giggled like a child as he watched…
The Major
I lost a dear friend recently. He didn’t do funerals, so there is this. He was a United States Air Force pilot who once harbored…
Dem Bums
Although published in 1997, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Wait Till Next Year resonates during this long, hot, isolative summer. It is at heart a book…
Ida T.
Trailblazing journalist Ida Tarbell was one of a small group of citizen reporters at McClure’s monthly magazine who helped forge the role of the free…
