I passed through southern Arizona last week and called up Shaine Parker. He lives in the little border town Douglas, and a couple of years ago he spent several months, full time on a grant, gathering into big, plastic garbage bags what undocumented immigrants throw out on their secret treks north. Shaine said he would [...]
Read MoreMorten and I were at Bed, Bath & Beyond last night looking for Christmas cookie tins so he can send out his homemade Norwegian baked goodies to friends and family — including Scandos, boricuas, DR’s, and Jews. While he was poking through the shelves I spied a Martha-Stewart-fancy dreydl and took it over to show [...]
Read MoreI just made another work trip to Mexico, starting with the bracing metropolitan capital then heading to aching little villages in the South. The US State Department has a travel advisory out for Mexico, mainly because of drug-trafficking related violence on the border. But Americans are avoiding the interior as well. One still [...]
Read MoreThis summer I was at the Carnavalet, a museum in Paris that reprises that city’s history, with emphasis on the events of 1789-1799. The coolest thing there is the collection of French Revolution tchotchkes — everything from sans culottes paper dolls to lumpily glazed plates and mugs celebrating “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité,” as well [...]
Read MoreHere’s a must-read from the wonderful writer Judith Levine, about how Wall Street is as irresistible to Americans as wife beaters are to women:
For a girl who grew up in a communist family, this month’s events should be cause for fireworks. As Marx predicted, the self-sown seeds of capitalism’s own destruction are spreading tendrils [...]
Comments Off
In “Born-Again Democracy,” a comment in the Oct. 20 issue of The Nation, William Greider notes that “Our country is at a rare and dangerous juncture. The old order is crumbling, and virtually all the centers of power that govern us have been discredited by events…Given that political paralysis, people have to find their own [...]
Read MoreFound this today at the neighborhood 99-cent store, in the Bronx just across the Harlem River from Upper Manhattan. Have no idea what it means. It was mixed with a pile of other pink backpacks decorated with the identical Barbie face, but without the headscarf. The secular Barbies had the same plucked eyebrows, lipsticky [...]
Read More(ALL IMAGES IN THIS POST ARE COMPUTER GENERATED)
To go right to the “real or virtual” article, skip all the emo in italics. I won’t be offended!
A funny thing happened to me this weekend in Huntington, Long Island. I’d taken a commuter train there from Manhattan, to interview someone in a neighborhood that’s walking distance from [...]
Just some photos I’ve taken lately in Mexico…Aprovechen los colores … Enjoy the colors!
Read More
Comments(1)