Nipsey Russell
Dressed in a conservative business suit and tie but wearing a raffish porkpie hat, he offered a confident, sophisticated approach to comedy....
No smoking
Today marks 16 years since my last cigarette. And you still remember it to the day? Of course I do. Don't underestimate the power of an ad...
Rosa Parks (1913-2005)
One legend had it that she was a cleaning woman with bad feet who was too tired to drag herself to the rear of the bus. Another had it that ...
Reality trumps the Onion
Reality trumps the Onion once again: For years scientists at Philip Morris USA have studied how the human lung delivers a highly addictive...
The Torture Question
The Torture Question , from the PBS series Frontline , is available for online viewing. I was just astonished to find that many of my studen...
"The Politics of Penguins"
From Andrew Sullivan's essay on The March of the Penguins , "The Politics of Penguins": One of the chief campaigners against gay marriage, M...
"[Y]ou just need to look more hard-working"
The e-mail exchanges between FEMA's Michael Brown and associates as New Orleans lay underwater make for fascinating, appalling reading. I've...
Shopping with Rev Run
"Who said that a man of God is supposed to drive a Pinto?" "I'm very Kenny G, slow music CD-101." "I'm going to stay in my pool and eat fat-...
Brief review: Bait and Switch
Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream . New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005. $24.00 Like Nickel and...
Science and Buddhism
Science has always fascinated me. As a child in Tibet, I was keenly curious about how things worked. When I got a toy I would play with it a...
Howard Dully: "My Lobotomy"
Howard Dully was twelve years old when he was subjected to a transorbital lobotomy in 1960: "If you saw me you'd never know I'd had a loboto...
What you can't buy at Wal-Mart
I read a letter to the editor this morning stating that Wal-Mart has "basically anything you could ever imagine and need." Sigh. The writer ...
The Christmas truce
Well, we were in those trenches I don't know how long. Then it came, Christmas morning. So we stuck a board up -- "Merry Christmas." They al...
MLK
15 January 1929 - 4 April 1968 » The Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project » Frequently requested documents and audioclips Texts and aud...
Same as it ever was
From Dennis Dutton, "Hardwired to seek beauty": Throughout history and across cultures, the arts of homo sapiens have demonstrated universal...