( Tomdispatch.com ) – The Washington Post headline reads: “A big problem for young workers: 70- and 80-year-olds who won’t retire.” For the first time in history, reports Aden Barton, five generations are competing in the same workforce. His article laments a “demographic traffic jam” at the apexes of various employment pyramids, making it ever […]
This Time, from Climate to Palestine to Trump 2.0, we must listen to our wise Cassandras
( Tomdispatch.com) – A few days ago, my partner and I went in search of packing tape. Our sojourn on an idyllic (if tick-infested) Cape Cod island was ending and it was time to ship some stuff home. We stopped at a little odds-and-ends shop and found ourselves in conversation with the woman behind the […]
Birding in Gaza amid a Nightmare of War
( Tomdispatch.com ) – He’s a funny little chap: a sharp dresser with a sleek grey jacket, a white waistcoat, red shorts, and a small grey crest for a hat. With his shiny black eyes and stubby black beak, he’s quite the looker. Like the chihuahua of the bird world, the tufted titmouse has no […]
Republicans Plan to wage Class Warfare on Working People
( Tomdispatch.com) – Recently, you may have noticed that the hot weather is getting ever hotter. Every year the United States swelters under warmer temperatures and longer periods of sustained heat. In fact, each of the last nine months — May 2023 through February 2024 — set a world record for heat. As I’m writing […]
Trump Showed Us Who He Is the First Time: Term 2 Would Be a Thousand Times Worse
( Tomdispatch.com ) – Recently my partner and I had brunch with some old comrades, folks I first met in the 1996 fight to stop the state of California from outlawing affirmative action. Sadly, we lost that one and, almost three decades later, we continue to lose affirmative action programs thanks to a Supreme Court […]
Public Libraries under MAGA Threat: Banning what Matters
( Tomdisptach.com) – When my mother died in 2000, I inherited all her books. Sadly, after several moves and downsizings over the decades, her collection had shrunk. Still, it remains considerable and impressive in its own way. Her legacy to me included some special volumes like a first edition of Frederick W. Taylor’s The Principles […]
Nowhere to Run – The world’s Refugees say, ‘Gimme Shelter’
( Tomdispatch.com ) – Think of Donald Trump as, in his own fashion, a creature of climate change. After all, in 2015, he descended that escalator into the election race denouncing immigrants at the southern border (those “Mexican rapists”) and calling for a “big, fat, beautiful wall” to be built along those very lands. As […]
Is it Time (Once Again) for Nonviolent Rebellion? On Ending Dreams of Revenge in Israel, Palestine, and Elsewhere
( Tomdispatch.com) – When I was in my early twenties, I seriously considered murdering someone. He had given my best friend genital herpes, which many health practitioners then believed was the agent responsible for causing cervical cancer in women. (It wasn’t.) Back in the 1970s, though, I believed that, by infecting my friend, he might […]
Republican Contradictions: Are they Fascists or Nihilists — or Both?
( Tomdispatch.com ) – Sometimes the right wing in this country seems like a riddle wrapped in an enigma encased in a conundrum. Do they want to strengthen the government in line with the once-fringe doctrine of the “unitary executive,” concentrating most official power in the hands of a president who would then rule more […]