Monthly Archives: June 2012

The Smug Life: Having It All

Only in America would a woman with a husband, two children and her dream job at the State Department (with a back-up position as a tenured Princeton professor) complain that she can’t have it all. And only in America would the media gather around and commiserate. In the current issue of The Atlantic, Anne-Marie Slaughter, […]

The Next Rodney King

Somewhere there’s a young, black American male looking to hit it big on the Blue Lotto. A young, black man who has dropped out of school, has used drugs, spent some time in jail and has weighed the career options that seem available to him – hip-hop star, football or basketball star, drug dealer – […]

UPSET? Try Getting MADD

The Portland Public School District is like a dysfunctional family that has decided the answer to its problems is to remodel the living room. And Oregon’s Commission on Public Safety is like an investor who is contemplating moving money out of the one account that is paying dividends. These two entities are engaged in the […]

America’s Transit of Venus

What kind of civilization will America be in December 2117? Will it be reduced to a once-extravagant wonder, a country whose glory days are found in history books that nobody reads anymore? In Shirley Hazzard’s 1980 novel, “The Transit of Venus,” a prosperous New York attorney tells his wife, a young woman from Australia: “Our […]