News Day

Do most white people want to just stop talking about race? That’s what this week’s Pew Research poll seems to show. While 80 percent of African Americans “say the shooting in Ferguson raises important issues about race that merit discussion, whites disagree, with 47 percent saying “the issue of race is getting more attention than it deserves.” Continue reading →

Mothman of Point Pleasant

The Lowe Hotel brought me to Point Pleasant, West Virginia, “where history and rivers meet,” according to the town website. The Lowe Hotel is a grand old riverboat hotel, built in 1901 and originally named the Spencer Hotel. Owned by only three families during its 113 years, the grand old riverboat hotel is a lovely place to spend a night. Continue reading →

During the first weekend in August, about 400,000 people in and around Toledo couldn’t drink the water — or even wash in it. They normally get water from Lake Erie. This summer, Lake Erie was so polluted that the water was unfit for human use. Continue reading →

Tens of thousands of children from Honduras and El Salvador and Guatemala are fleeing violence in their home countries. Some have sought safe haven in Nicaragua and Costa Rica. More than 57,000 have entered the United States since October. Kevin, one of the 57,000, describes why he left his home in Honduras: Continue reading →

Though thinking and writing and worrying about the awful news takes up a lot of time and emotional space, I’m also enjoying summer’s simple pleasures, with a little more time this year than in the past several years. So here are three of my favorites: Continue reading →

Adel Daoud was the teenage son of immigrants, attending a neighborhood Islamic high school when the FBI started talking to him online. According to his mother,

“Daoud required extra assistance in school, and was heavily dependent on her: ‘He’s not the person with a complete mind. He didn’t talk until five. He was the last one of my kids to talk. He doesn’t even talk Arabic….like the rest of our family, because he’s slow.’” Illusion of Justice, p. 28

Continue reading →

UPDATED: 7/30/2014: Republicans care about poor people! Yes, they do, and to prove it, Paul Ryan (R-WI) is proposing a poverty plan. His plan comes just in time for the 2014 election campaign, and maybe also in time to feature in a 2016 presidential bid. Unlike FDR’s New Deal or LBJ’s War on Poverty, however, this is a plan that will make more people poorer. Paul Ryan loves poor people so much that he wants more of them! Continue reading →

Have you heard about New York’s new “poor doors?” Seems that in return for tax and zoning breaks for giant luxury apartment complexes, the city required that developers provide some affordable housing units in the buildings. So the developers designed the building with a back door to be used by tenants of the affordable units. Continue reading →

How many journalists does it take to change a light bulb?

“We just report the facts, we don’t change them.”

I don’t believe that for a minute.  Continue reading →