The New York Times probably doesn’t understand gentrification

Gentrification

Gentrification is a fairly important social construct, although admittedly probably a bunch of people overuse the word in the modern world. If you’ve never heard of it, first remove the rock above your body, and then read this: it’s basically when… Continue Reading

Jay-Z offers one of the best summaries of The War on Drugs

Jay Z War on Drugs

I went to Montreal for New Year’s Eve 2008 to 2009. First word of caution: don’t go to Montreal for New Year’s Eve. It’s a beautiful city and it has a tremendous food/beer culture, but … on December 31 of a given… Continue Reading

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Lentils (superfood!) are the future, and you can either embrace it or form an orderly line of haters to the left

I’ve been cooking for about four years now, and I’ve done all variety of different types of crap (literally, some of it has tasted very bad). In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been messing around more and more with… Continue Reading

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2016 Alert: As Chris Christie struggles with bridges, Marco Rubio turns to poverty as an issue

Two interesting things as relate to the 2016 Republican side of the Presidential equation are in play right now. Today, Chris Christie will address this whole bridge-gate controversy. Meanwhile, yesterday — in the LBJ Room on Capitol Hill, 50 years after… Continue Reading

How can we help the homeless when temperatures get this low?

This is kind of a complicated question in the broadest sense, so I won’t post very long on this — because I’m ill-equipped to give an answer. New York, for example, has a cold-weather shelter guarantee, as do many other… Continue Reading

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The orca shames us all, food-chain wise; humans and pigs are on the same level

There’s a lot going on right now with orcas (killer whales), almost none of it very good. (“Nature gets revenge on man.”) Here’s some moderately good news for the species, I suppose: they’re now, officially, all the way at the top… Continue Reading

On Kevin Carter’s famous photo and suicide

I saw this story on Reddit this morning — it was a TIL — about Kevin Carter’s suicide, which took place three months after he won the Pulitzer Prize for arguably one of the most depressing photos ever taken. People… Continue Reading

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Can Robert Reich, formerly of the Clinton administration, change the national dialogue?

Reich went from being Clinton’s Secretary of Labor to a professor at Brandeis (the class was called “Wealth and Poverty”) to, now, a professor at UC-Berkeley. His central issue is income inequality, and his new film (trailer above) is called Inequality for… Continue Reading