Skip to content

Category: Newsletter

On Conflict in Ukraine and in Two War Stories (Newsletter)

Published by Admin on March 13, 2022

This month’s topical commentary comes with a commercial.

In a perverse twist of ancient history, here comes the Ides of March and Ukrainians are falling to bombs, missiles, and shells aimed at them by a modern-day power-mad emperor. We’re in dangerous territory that could have been skirted. I can’t help but feel things would have been different had the US and EU not engineered a 2013 coup in Ukraine that threatened to make it an anti-Russian economic and military outpost. (If you object to the socialist slant of that article, see this 2019 paper by neorealist political scientist John Mearsheimer that largely agrees with its analysis.) Read and weep about what the West hoped to reap at Russia’s expense — an enlarged military perimeter, lucrative investments, austerity measures, neofascist nationalism…

Continue readingOn Conflict in Ukraine and in Two War Stories (Newsletter)
1 Comment
On Making Black and Other Lives Materially Matter (newsletter)
Black Lives Matter signs picket a church in Minneapolis. From @BLMLawnSignsTC Community on Facebook

On Making Black and Other Lives Materially Matter (newsletter)

Published by Admin on February 16, 2022
Celebrating Black History Month reminds one that, like Dr. Martin Luther King, too many African Americans enter history before their time, felled by those sworn to serve and protect them. Their murders have fueled civil rights uprisings such as swept the country in June 2020, after police blithely took the lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other Black martyrs. The Black Lives Matter movement these events crystallized may be changing things, but how much it has impacted communities across America is tough to assess, at least for me. I guess you have to be there to know.

Continue readingOn Making Black and Other Lives Materially Matter (newsletter)
1 Comment
Remembering Forgotten Lore

Remembering Forgotten Lore

Published by Admin on November 17, 2021

As the year inexorably winds down to the orgies of consumption I sometimes call the holydaze, I find myself unaccountably nostalgic for the “old daze,” when my parents, grandparents, and perhaps an aunt, cousin or guest gathered around the table at my childhood home in Connecticut. Along with my parents and theirs, five of my twelve first cousins have since departed to their final destinations. Of the survivors, one of us lives close at hand and she’ll be with us on Thanksgiving, hopefully with stories. Her mom was a fabulous cook who threw large dinner parties I well remember that I’ll never upstage, even with Peking Duck as our main course. (Don’t ask why. It just happened that way.)

Continue readingRemembering Forgotten Lore
Leave a Comment
“The freedom and exhilaration of moral insensibility” (Newsletter)William Hogarth (1697–1764) The reward of cruelty, 1751 from series Four stages of cruelty
William Hogarth (1697–1764) The reward of cruelty, 1751, from series Four stages of cruelty (engraving) See note at end of post. Baillieu Library Print Collection, University of Melbourne

“The freedom and exhilaration of moral insensibility” (Newsletter)

Published by Admin on October 25, 2021

This is a difficult subject, but recently it’s been bothering me a lot and it’s all Steve Bannon’s fault.

Let’s say you hate something—anything from water pollution to child trafficking—with a passion. Maybe a kid you know got poisoned by PCBs or disappeared. You loathe it so much, you feel, that if you ever captured a trafficker or a polluter you would gladly torture him. Better yet, get someone else to do it and enjoy their suffering vicariously.

Maybe you wouldn’t get off on that, but mightn’t you titter at someone slipping on a banana peel? That’s a mild form of schadenfreude, and we’ve all felt it at some point in our lives. We’re talking about human

Continue reading“The freedom and exhilaration of moral insensibility” (Newsletter)
Leave a Comment

The “Beautiful Madness” that is Exarcheia (newsletter)

Published by Admin on September 10, 2021
Street map of Exarchia Neighborhood in Central Athens from openstreetmap.org
Street map of Exarcheia neighborhood in Central Athens from openstreetmap.org
“The walls here are like a daily newspaper, trying to make us get off the couch and roam the streets demanding all that is written on the walls.” — Níkos Tρavvós
Breathlessly stumble down the western flank of the Athenian tourist destination Mount Lycabettus and soon you’ll find yourself slack-jawed, taking in a part of the city that looks and feels a whole lot different from the tourist haunts just blocks away. You’ve entered the twilight zone, a compact triangular enclave called Exarcheia, home to artists, poets, intellectuals, immigrants, communists and anarchists, a creative churn of radical visions, defying authority, making its own rules, perpetually decolonizing itself. Wikipedia tells us that in Exarcheia:
Continue readingThe “Beautiful Madness” that is Exarcheia (newsletter)
Leave a Comment

Bringing Home the Bacon (newsletter)

Published by Admin on August 19, 2021

Uncooked meaty bacon, courtesy of Science Meets Food blog

Dear Friends,
Before I get going, let me update you on last month’s used car quest. Craigslist came to the rescue with an ad for a Forest Green 2010 Toyota Corolla EX sedan without frills but in great condition with new exhaust system and tires. Turns out it was traded in by a local couple at 115,000 miles and our seller took it off the dealer’s hands. He’s a Ugandan dude who drives around in a flatbed tow truck, which is how he delivered the Corolla. The next week he returned to make off with our old Honda, which he bought for himself as an extra car. Interesting fellow; at about 130 pounds, he’s thin as a rail and dark as night with handsome chiseled features and likes to share his carefully construed life philosophy. And I when wanted the car checked out, he trucked to my auto mechanic who, it turned out, had known him for years.

When she came down from Vermont to exchange cars, our daughter was delighted with it. I love it when things groove like that. In case you’re wondering, after the exchange of cars we were out around $5K, though sale tax, title fee, and registration bumped that up ten percent. We’re all happy with the deal and I’m particularly happy to be done responding to car ads by shady guys named Bob or Tony.

Continue readingBringing Home the Bacon (newsletter)
Leave a Comment