A little visit to New England in October 2017, including stops at Acadia National Park, Lexington, and Concord.
Don Pogreba is a current writer and retired teacher of English, Social Studies and Debate, and a loyal, if often sad, fan of the San Diego Padres and Portland Timbers. When he is not traveling, he is working on his classroom web site or dreaming about another adventure.
A little visit to New England in October 2017, including stops at Acadia National Park, Lexington, and Concord.
The Dirty Secret of War: It Can Be As Compelling As It Is Ugly–“The Iliad accepts violence as a permanent factor in human life,” Knox continues, “and accepts it without sentimentality, for it is just as sentimental to pretend that war does not have its monstrous ugliness as it is to deny that it has its own strange and fatal beauty...
TURN ON, TUNE IN, DROP BY THE OFFICE–Of all the drugs available, psychedelics have long been considered among the most powerful and dangerous. When Richard Nixon launched the “war on drugs” in the 1970s, the authorities claimed LSD caused people to jump out of windows and fried users’ brains. When Ronald Reagan was the governor of...
Vilnius Klaipėda Kaunas Vilnius, Genocide Museum Klaipėda Vilnius Klaipėda Kaunas Vilnius Vilnius Klaipeda Vilnius Vilnius Klaipėda The Republic of Užupis Klaipėda The Republic of Užupis Vilnius Klaipėda Klaipėda Beginning of the Baltic Chain, Vilnius A wall from a Jewish store preserved inside a building in Vilnius Klaipėda Vilnius...
When I was very young, I dreamed that I would one day own a home with a library. It was a strange dream for a kid from a working class family, but I had rather vivid and specific expectations for what my library would one day look like. It would have been filled ceiling to floor with heavy, leather-bound books, hold a reading chair with...
Hurricane Harvey’s Impact — And How It Compares To Other Storms–Estimates of Harvey’s cost vary, with some predicting that the storm will be the most expensive in U.S. history at over $190 billion, surpassing Hurricane Katrina. (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates Katrina to have cost around $160 billion.)...
Single Payer Is Not a Principle–Given the ill-will and recrimination, it’s easy to forget that this is a fight among friends and allies about how best to pursue shared goals and values. Much of the internal Democratic Party debate confuses instrumental operational questions with questions of core principle. By which I mean, to put...
The Lost Cause Rides Again–And all this must be added to a basic artistic critique—Confederate is a shockingly unoriginal idea, especially for the allegedly avant garde HBO. “What if the white South had won?” may well be the most trod-upon terrain in the field of American alternative history. There are novels about it, comic books...
One of the most interesting places I’ve traveled over the past few years was Memento Park in Budapest, an open-air museum filled with the detritus of Soviet rule over Eastern Bloc countries. There’s nothing the Soviets seemed to enjoy more than depositing gigantic statues of heroic communist workers, soldiers, and statesmen...