What would it take for you to turn down $150,000? Would you walk away from that money to protect the environment or the social good?

I recently went home to western Pennsylvania, ground zero in the hydraulic fracturing (known as fracking) wars. In winter, western Pennsylvania is gray and cold,… Read full post »

David Simon, writer/producer of the acclaimed series The Wire and Treme, and former professional journalist, has just begun blogging at davidsimon.com, using one of his first posts to decry the practice of blogging. Calling today’s media landscape an “e-race to the bottom,” he says… Read full post »

I have long loved old china and glassware. Over the years, the older members of my family have learned that I am a willing and grateful repository of any and all mismatched china and glassware. Like many things, you can trace china and glassware to traditions and regions—places where production… Read full post »

I’ve long been a language descriptivist. I love the fluidity of the English language, how, like a river, it cuts its path around obstacles, sometimes doubles back on itself, occasionally floods over its banks (in literary terms, this would be the writing of Faulkner), and occasionally recedes d… Read full post »

The managers at Denny’s did everything short of coming right out and asking, “One of you has money to pay for this, right?” It was easy to tell that was the question uppermost in their minds – did one of us have money? Their eyes lit… Read full post »

I have just returned from the my office building's ladies' room and I have to ask -- Do you talk on your cellphone while in the stall?

Of course, that, along with the expected, was what was happening in the stall next me. A chatty conversation accompanied by the whoosing sound… Read full post »

In 2006, according to Wikipedia, Rush Limbaugh was unmarried. In 2006, according to documents obtained by The Smoking Gun, Rush Limbaugh took a trip to the Dominican Republic with four other men. Upon his return to the United States, a mislabeled bottle of Viagra was found in Limbaugh’s luggage… Read full post »

Dear Catholic Church:

I am following with interest the contraception debate and am coming to you with a request of my own. I can’t in good conscience contribute anymore of my religiously unaffiliated dollars to your universities, hospitals, and other institutions in the form of my taxes, which h… Read full post »

I am not the first person to mistake pathological dysfunction for love. I am not the first person to have years of youth devoured by an unhealthy relationship. I am not the first person to have that moment where the veil lifts and suddenly, in the blink of an eye, the… Read full post »

I was not born to the one percent. In fact, by the time I came along, my family was pretty far down the socio-economic ladder, with my mother raising her children on a secretary’s salary in an economically depressed Appalachian town. She never made over $20,000.

A… Read full post »

(2,570 words. I always exceed my name!)

Fiction Friday II – Open Call

Man’s Best Friend

It’s getting cold. Too cold to live outside in a tent but I’ve kind of boxed myself in, you see, and I’m not quite sure how to get myself out of it.… Read full post »

Sometimes when you’re feeling morose, the best in thing in the world is an alligator. Not as a pet or a pair of shoes or fried up in a fritter, but in the wild, swimming around or sunning on a bank, doing alligator things.

My job is solitary. I’m… Read full post »

Recently, I sat at my desk at work and, using the standard software that came with my desktop, I edited a few scenes out of a video.  It required a few clicks of the mouse, a few taps of the keys, a few flicks of the wrist.  It was… Read full post »

Scientists and psychologists will tell you that it’s a normal albeit somewhat rare phenomenon – nothing to worry about, something that happens to most people at least once. The sane, sober explanation of what happened is sleep paralysis. Stanford University’s Sleep a… Read full post »

I don’t consider myself a government apologist—Congress does plenty of incomprehensible things and the halls of democracy are full of people who are in it for themselves—but government can work. Slowly, ponderously, clumsily, maybe, but it can and has worked. One of the things that… Read full post »

I’ve made my bed and now I will sleep in it. I’ve made my bed with organic cotton sheets and a synthetic down comforter and squashy pillows. It is one of the most sensuous experiences I know, crawling into a bed that has been freshly made with clean sheets, a bed… Read full post »

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”Ernest Hemingway

Laura Miller’s recent Salon article, When Anyone Can be a Published Author, resonated with me because of a phenomenon I’ve been encountering over and over, especially am/… Read full post »

The recent primary wins of Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman are giving us a familiar narrative: former corporate CEOs, fists pumping the air, talking about how they will correct the course of the foundering ships of state using boardroom tactics. Budgets will be slashed and deficits slayed. Profitabilit… Read full post »