E. DaCosta In the abortion debate, you are either for or against, good or bad, a half-wit or a serial killer. In psychological terms, this is a form of “splitting” — a defense mechanism which stridently places people (and discourses) into categories of either black or white, all or nothing…

Elmore Bolling (see photo above) was lynched in 1947 in Alabama for becoming a little too prosperous for the liking of some of his neighbors. I used to live in Alabama. Why did I not know about him? Or even just one example of the several hundred who were executed by mob in my state. Where were the memorials? “You ask anybody in this country to name one African-American lynched between 1877 and 1950, and…

In response to Eliot A. Cohen’s piece, How Will Trump’s Presidency End? And to see the more intimate, domestic side of this Trumpian tragedy, we turn to King Lear. Trump, like Lear, has children (perhaps more than we know) whose lives have been cast into chaos and yet what Trump…

Bourdain describes a man, in one of the more delightful episodes of Parts Unknown who led a project, in the late 19th century, to build a railway up an unspeakably steep mountain in Punjab, India. It’s a job that would be near impossible with the most advanced 21st century equipment…

Last night I saw Gaelynn Lea — a singer/songwriter and fiddle player rooted in Irish traditional music — perform in Burlington in a small black box theater in the basement if the Flynn Center. She played solo but since she works with a looping pedal you have the sensation of…

THIS IS WHY DONALD HAS 40 % APPROVAL If you want to understand why the sitting president of the US in early 2018 still — amazingly — has a 40 percent approval rating, please observe some of the details of running a tiny town in a rural area. I live in small-town Vermont. Despite national perceptions of Vermont…