News Companion

The International Space Station, orbiting above earth, has a problem. One of its cooling systems has failed. The astronauts responded in a r...

With the passing of a leader who persevered beyond all measure, and finally triumphed to father a nation, a cluster of wishes: - that a le...

As the temperature dipped below 20 degrees F on a Thursday evening, the choice looked to be between fulfilling my responsibilities as design...

Written for Memorial Day, 2013 In a time when most people feel disconnected from the nation's wars and those who fight them, there...

Back when I was taking care of indoor plants at the Michigan Union, on whose steps John F. Kennedy announced his proposal for a Peace Corps,...

As of yesterday, an overweening lust to filibust has finally been busted in the Senate, restoring some trust that majority rule can at last...

At the local movie theater, we were already in a weakened state before the main feature began. The previews hit us like ten minutes of shock...

News reports tend to emphasize the negative about any change proposed for or imposed on society, deepening the challenge of altering the sta...

Convention holds that our political axis extends left and right from the moderate center in opposite directions, with extreme left and right...

The New York Times is one of the bedrocks of news, which makes it hard to understand why its opinion page would show a weakness for ill-info...

"If a problem can't be solved, enlarge it" -- attributed to Dwight D. Eisenhower After a showing of Martin Luther King'...

This was the summer that Taste of Honey got Daft Punked. If you wonder what others have been doing with their summer, the 120 million hits o...

Today, August 28, 2013, marks fifty years since Martin Luther King delivered his "I have a dream" speech on the steps of the Linc...

It's often said that a tax on carbon is both urgently needed and politically impossible. One reason for the political roadblock is num...

Being a problem solver, my first impulse upon seeing a headline like (" Sinkhole Causes Florida Resort to Partially Collapse " ) i...

The Aug. 1 CNN headline read "Judge sentences Cleveland kidnapper Ariel Castro to life, plus 1,000 years". I'm sure many peop...

Some thoughts on "The Beach Builders" , a New Yorker article by John Seabrook that asks the question, "Can the Jersey Shore b...

A surprise to look at the June 26 Trenton Times and see a sheriff admit to taking bribes "from people seeking positions or promotions...

One reason climate change does not get mentioned in day to day reporting of events such as droughts and floods is the persistence of the ste...

A critique of the news media's abdication of its role in correcting widespread misperceptions (from a 12/12/12 letter to a local newspap...