Here’s an initial comment: the more I blog, the less I know. That is, I find that blogging forces me to think carefully about issues, so as to attempt, to the best of my ability, to write something that’s well-informed and persuasive. Yes, sometimes I write for an entirely different reason — to vent about things that make me angry — and I try to identify when that’s what I’m doing. And I know that readers who disagree with me... Read more
If you, like me, have been meaning to check in on how Germany’s doing with its newly-arrived immigrants, and if you, like me, have some New York Times pageviews left, you’re in luck, because there’s a new article at the NYT about the topic, or, rather, about the anti-immigrant sentiment in the former East Germany: “One Legacy of Merkel? Angry East German Men Fueling the Far Right.” The headline is misleading, because the article is about a much more narrow... Read more
This is an article from the Tribune a week ago that I’d been meaning to write about: “Cook County promoted former Chicago alderman once recommended for firing after allegedly saying, ‘I can’t stand these Mexicans’” Its title in the print version is more succinct: “County promoted worker after slurs about Mexicans.” The long and short of it is this: former Chicago Alderman Vilma Colom worked for the county as a labor hearing officer in 2016 when two workers overheard a personal... Read more
Very few things about this election were a surprise. The Democrats took the House – not a surprise. The GOP held the Senate – not a surprise, though I was surprised that they increased the number of seats. Pritzker took the Illinois governor’s office, and now control every statewide office – not a surprise. The Democrats regained their supermajority in the Illinois House, and then some, and increased their level of supermajority in the Illinois Senate – not a surprise,... Read more
That is, don’t pull that (mostly metaphorical) lever for any candidate in any race where you don’t know enough about the candidates to make a reasonable decision. Don’t vote for the candidate who matches your race or sex, or the candidate whose race or sex you believe is underrepresented. Don’t vote for the candidate about whom you saw an ad on TV last night that they hate women or want babies to die or whatever wild accusations in scare-filter mode... Read more
Finally got around to seeing this movie today. Here are a couple random thoughts: It was definitely not the soaring inspirational treatment of the moon landing that one might expect from knowing nothing other than the general topic of the film. Instead the title is to be taken more literally: it was about the “first man,” that is, Neil Armstrong, and may or may not have taken liberties with his life and his personality. I had read that the film... Read more
Here’s an article I’m going to share with you because I saw it on twitter and it’s just sooo silly: “What It Feels Like to Be Disenfranchised by a Voter ID Law; I had a birth certificate, a photo ID, and utility bills proving my residency. But Tennessee decided that wasn’t good enough.” This is one of a series of articles in Vice that take the form of first-person accounts of Why I Didn’t Vote. The story is this: the... Read more
Here’s a sort of pre-Election Day post meant as a conversation-starter. Consider the rhetoric you’ve heard lately: “our democracy is threatened by Trumpism.” Or by gerrymandering. Or tightening of voter ID regulations. Or lack thereof. Or by low turnout. Or too much turnout by voters who don’t understand the issues sufficiently well. Or too many white men. Or not enough white men. But it occurs to me that when we speak of “democracy” we really mean much more than that. ... Read more
Yup. My youngest is now in 6th grade. Inspired by youtube videos he’d been watching, he wanted to experiment with craft foam to make armor for a Roman soldier, though after some more investigation, and learning that the Romans had strips of armor but the Greeks had more of a breastplate look, he settled on the latter. Conveniently enough, I had a pattern for a tunic (I had used it to make Roman soldiers for the school’s Living Stations of... Read more
Yeah, a more conventional blogpost title would be something like, “what you should think about birthright citizenship,” but I think there’s a lot of room for disagreement here, and I’m not going to claim that I have all the right answers. But let’s think about the issue a little bit. To begin with, there are three separate issues: Is citizenship at birth for anyone born in the United States, other than the narrow exception of someone born of two parents... Read more
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