Past Articles

“Do you have what it takes to be a 21st century pioneer?” I read about Northwest North Dakota in Sunday’s Times. Here is how the website prairieopportunities.com entices urbanites to flee to their northern paradise. “Most don’t”. NW North Dakota has openings for 5,000 people to live under clear skies, […]

George Schrieber came to lunch with Cathie and Robbie, our neighbors in Holyoke. George is one of my father’s oldest friends. They met in the early ’50s and married in the same year 1953, in New York City. George is a hale and hearty 87 now, and he moved four […]

Today’s NY Times Magazine was rich with fascinating nuggets. First was a profile of a Korean filmmaker named Park Chanwook who has made superviolent yet intriguing movies that mostly have to do with vengence. In one film, a man whose daughter is kidnapped takes brutal revenge on the captured kidnapper. […]

Chip Ainsworth wrote for the Valley Advocate back in the ’80s, when I worked there in paste-up. He covered sports, and now he’s made a comeback of sorts; every Saturday his column runs in the Recorder. He is a talented wordsmith, I loved this opener about the Red Sox this […]

NASCAR said Wednesday it was “outrageous” that “Dateline NBC” targeted one of its race tracks last weekend for a possible segment on anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States. NASCAR said NBC confirmed it was sending Muslim-looking men to a race, along with a camera crew to film fans’ reactions. The […]

You can count on the Onion for something blogworthy on this rainy Friday night, when we’re all staying in, and Sam is here for pizza. “In what wildlifestyle reformation volunteers are calling a “positive step,” the first group of rehabilitated Girls Gone Wild were released back into the civilized world […]

Dennis Lim writes about the new but familiarly-titled movie in the Village Voice. “At one point in Basic Instinct 2, Sharon Stone’s castrating nympho-bitch is diagnosed as a “masked psychotic”—a sneaky acknowledgment, perhaps, that the real subject of this sadly anticlimactic sequel is not sexual warfare or the pleasure principle […]

More media today: got an early call from Tom Vannah, he said the story that the Advocate published about the Karakoram Mountains in Pakistan would be linked up on their website. Tom is a bundle of energy, They just began publishing two new glossy magazines, PreviewCT and PreviewMA, and GoNOMAD […]

MSNBC explains why airline coffee is often really bad, and what to do about it. “It’s all in the H2O. Many people believe that bad coffee comes from bad water, and they might be right. It is certainly true that airplane water doesn’t taste all that great. It is, after […]

Where does the day go? That must be what other business owners say to themselves, as the day winds down and you look at the clock to see it’s after five. I often wrestle with five, that’s when we close, because nobody seems to want coffee between 5-6. So we […]

Joe Conason writes in the NY Observer: The two individuals most responsible for the end of his political career are Senator John McCain, whose committee hearings on Indian gaming drew attention to the Abramoff scandal; and Emily Miller, the press flack who squealed on Mr. Scanlon to the Justice Department […]

Today’s Republican included this column by William F. Buckley about the strikers in France. Like the author, I have been amazed by the naivete and belief that laws allowing employers to fire people are such a sore subject in France. Buckley first states the problem: more than 30% of the […]

An ad agency for GM had a cool idea: let the public create a video ad for the Chevy Tahoe SUV. David Utter of Web Pro News asked: “What could possibly go wrong?” “How about a slew of global warming complaints and viscious anti-SUV spots, quickly becoming viral videos and […]

Preliminary results of a study, reports today’s Washington Post, found more evidence that younger people are interested in news, just not the print version. The study found, for example, that 37 percent of adults who visited The Washington Post’s Web site in the past 30 days were ages 18 to […]

In case you missed the barrage of press attention given to Drake University writing major Skyler Bartels this week, here’s a rundown. Beth Callas writes about this dubious piece of news on Courtv.com. “With the encouragement of his college advisor, he set out to spend his spring break in a […]

Tired of playing second fiddle to men in conservative Saudi Arabia, five women decided if you can’t beat them, join them. Reuters reports today. “Al Watan newspaper said the five women underwent sex change surgery abroad over the past 12 months after they developed a “psychological complex” due to male […]

Jeff Taylor made a fortune by founding Monster.com. Now he’s got a new venture called Eons, for which he has raised $10 million. But nobody yet knows what the company will offer its target audience—people over age 50. Haiwatha Bray writes in today’s Boston Globe. “A Pew survey finds that […]

I’ve reached the end, finally, of a book I’ve been reading since October 2005. It was a lovely book, Paul Theroux’ “The Pillars of Hercules,” given to me by my fellow traveler Carla Waldemar, as we left Santiago. In one of the last scenes, the author visits another legendary writer, […]