You know the way Shakespeare created a portrait of a family’s hard feelings in King Lear, his tragedy about a raging, storming English king with three daughters? That play, set in Gloucester, speaks to me now of how Congress and the country are falling apart. It even takes me back to the Civil War. Shakespeare […]

Woody Guthrie’s prescription for inequality in America was straightforward: “Rich folks got your money with politics. You can get it back with politics.” For Guthrie, “politics” meant more than voting, since both parties routinely cough-up candidates who meekly accept the business-as-usual system of letting bosses and bankers control America’s wealth and power. It’s useless, he […]

We have entered a new social media hell, where online creeps run sadistic schemes targeting high school kids. Since late 2021, their ruses have driven at least 20 young people, mostly boys, to take their lives. One victim was a 17-year-old star athlete at Marquette Senior High School in Michigan named Jordan DeMay. As reported […]

My ancient history professor, Martin Ostwald, taught me all about Athens in the golden age, the fifth century B.C. – and more. Somehow he circled back to me early in the year 2024 A.D. His seminar of four students met once a week, Thursday afternoons, for time travel that raced like chariots. Famous in his […]

Historical analogies rarely carry much weight, especially in a time when so much about politics has changed so rapidly. To compare what is happening in 2024 to events that occurred over half a century earlier hardly seems useful. It mostly isn’t. And yet the election of 1968, whose outcome proved disastrous for America and the […]