Sabine Heinlein's essay, The Cruelty of Kindness, poses the question of whether no-kill animal shelters have gone too far in saving every life. It comes down to the question of whether any kind of life, no matter how painful, is better than death. Maybe I'm all alone...
So I finally watched The Purge (2013) and The Purge: Anarchy (2014), which have to be called "social science fiction action horror" because there's so much going on in them. The first movie seems to be another home invasion story that pits a family against assailants...
According to Vox's Why we grieve artists we've never met, people can mourn and weep over people they never personally knew for this reason, "We don't cry because we knew them. We cry because they helped us know ourselves." Writer Caroline Framke reproduces this tweet...
Last night at a Chicago Council on Global Affairs talk I heard one of the most engaging, yet disturbing, speakers I've ever seen. Robert Paarlberg, author of The United States of Excess: Gluttony and the Dark Side of American Exceptionalism, talked about what he...
Michael Moore's latest movie, Where to Invade Next is instructive, disturbing and infuriating, but Moore ends it on a note of hope. He "invades" several countries, supposedly stealing their great ideas about education, women's rights, treatment of prisoners and other...
I'm caught up on all the episodes of The Walking Dead and here's my main question: if more humans turn into walkers every day and the remaining humans are increasingly unpleasant -- as one must be to survive in such an environment -- what's the point of trying to...
In November I began watching The Walking Dead. I plowed through all the seasons available on Netflix and then downloaded part of season six from iTunes. Season six resumes tonight. Here's what I think so far. 1. What insanity/stupidity leads women (Lori, Maggie) to...
In 2012, work began on the impressive challenge of turning Ann Patchett's novel Bel Canto into a staged, modern opera. Now Bel Canto is playing at the Lyric Opera through January 17, 2016. I heard about it at the beginning of December and, even though I'd never been...
Now that I spend more time with people who weren't born in the U.S, I see American culture differently. I'm fascinated by the things such people identify as being good and bad about us. I have new appreciation for our American never-say-die attitude and the way we're...
[I originally posted this January 5, 2006.] What's Christmas without tradition? The Christmas tradition for my blog is the annual posting of my summary of the History Channel's Christmas Unwrapped: The History of Christmas. I find it extremely relevant to the annual...
During Chicago Ideas Week I attended Univision's seminar on "Marketing to Hispanics." This is what I learned from the data collected by Univision's marketing department. General facts There are 58 million Hispanics in the U.S. which is 18% of the total U.S....
What is happening to the meanings of "yes" and "no?" I asked someone last night if he and his companion were old friends, and he said, "No, yeah we've been friends for years." On The Daily Show, Noah Trevor asked Gloria Steinem if she thought the women's movement...
My fellow Americans, the nice story about Thanksgiving starting with the first white settlers in North America inviting the American Indians to celebrate the harvest isn't strictly true. In fact, the white people and the native people were probaby at war a lot of the...
Most Americans know the proper amount to tip on a restaurant food bill. It's 20% and anything less looks cheap and mean. That's because service industry workers in the U.S. are paid about $2.18 to $5 an hour from their employers and that's it. That's right: American...
We Americans grow up with kid-focused holidays such as Halloween and Christmas where everything is for kids: candy, decorations, special clothes, parties and games. Christmas traditions in the U.S. were originally established primarily to celebrate childhood (and make...