There is no health-care debate in the United States. There’s not even a debate over principles. You’d think a nation intent on overhauling a broken system that presidents going back to Harry Truman have been trying to fix would want to openly discuss what it wants – universal care? Single-payer? A private-public combination? Nationalized insurance? […]
Satisfaction at GM Dealership – Irony, Spiders and All
Last week, GM went bankrupt. Naturally, my wife, Cheryl, and I went to a GM dealership and bought a car. Her Buick was acting up. Strange sounds, twittery squeaks, leaks all over. We took it to the dealership for a look. It turned into a $2,700 sentence, before tax. I couldn’t tell you why. Mechanics […]
Devaluing Journalists Who Dig for Truth in War Zone
[Or. pub date: Sept. 20, 2009] You’d think reporters were a lower life form. And I’m not referring to the way bean-counters are exterminating them out of newsrooms. Stephen Farrell is a New York Times reporter posted in Afghanistan. On Sept. 5, Taliban forces kidnapped him and his Afghan interpreter, Sultan Munadi, who’s also a […]
Immigration’s Tale from New York’s #7 Subway Train
In New York, the story of immigration’s present and foreseeable future is on the “Immigrant Express,” the No. 7 subway line that crosses Queens, the country’s single-most diverse county (46.1 percent of its residents were born abroad).
The Many Deaths of Pat Tillman
Dirty wars make for dirty stories. Tillman’s is one of them for the way the Army and Gen. McChrystal covered up his death by “friendly fire” then whitewashed investigation after investigation.
V.S. Naipaul’s Nobel
Naipaul’s reputation has been growing as much for being the Susan Lucci of laureates as for publishing stories, plotless novels and journalistic travelogues at dependable intervals since 1957.