Rise and Shine and Shout for Glory
On a recent Friday, the morning opened with bright sun and blue sky. Boulder had had its wettest spring in one hundred years, and this had put a crimp in our hiking regimen. Tornadoes had touched down nearby, and we had seen rainbows several times a week. Boulder Creek was running fast and deep, which… | more |
Music, Music, Music, or How Amy Winehouse Made Me Cry
Playwright William Congreve said: “Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.” And so it does. Perhaps the Russian revolutionary Lenin had Congreve in mind when he said, according to Maxim Gorky: “I know the ‘Appassionata’ inside out and yet I am willing to listen to it… | more |
Karen and I love the canyon country of southern Utah. Last November, we spent three weeks hiking in the five national parks that span the state from west to east. We drove from Tucson north to Phoenix and up, up to Sedona and Flagstaff, rising 6,000 feet out of the polluted desert developments and into… | more |
The Blighted Groves of Academe
The more I read about the state of our colleges and universities, the more thankful I am that I quit my job at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown (UPJ) in 2001, after thirty-two years of teaching. I wrote the following essay a dozen years ago, and since then, matters have gotten progressively worse, not… | more |
All The News That's Fit to Steal
In December of last year, Monthly Review magazine, of which I am Associate Editor, published an article by Jim Straub titled “Braddock, Pennsylvania: Out of the Furnace and into the Fire.” In his essay, Jim told the story of one of the nation’s most devastated industrial towns. He described how this once famous steel city,… | more |
One of the themes of Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate is work. More specifically the theme is dead-end work, how there is so much of this in the United States. Work has always been something that has interested me; I taught about, and for years I scrutinized my own labor. Now for a few… | more |
School Starts/Remembering Wyoming
I taught my first class this past Tuesday. It is a large lecture section of seventy students, in a course titled “Globalization and Labor.” It was the first time I was in a classroom like this since 2001. I was nervous about it. Lectures to prepare, exams to grade, hassles to deal with. The paperwork… | more |
What's It All About / A Rant about Landlords
We drove the long and dismal trip from Washington DC to Amherst, Massachusetts on Monday, August 20. It was overcast and rainy, matching our moods. It had been a long and difficult ninety days on the road promoting my book. I wondered if it had been worth it. True, the book has done well in… | more |