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.
“I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have...
The Unique Tensions of Couples Who Marry Across Classes–Marriages that unite two people from different class backgrounds might seem to be more egalitarian, and a counterweight to forces of inequality. But recent research shows that there are limitations to cross-class marriages as well. www.theatlantic.com Detroit\’s Golden...
It’s possible that some people might find the idea of racing to Europe, enduring two 16 hour layovers (one on either end) and spending a week in Denmark to be the opposite of a restful spring break, but those people are wrong. Just wrong. Sitting here in the Copenhagen Airport after an excellent seven nights in this interesting...
Sometimes you have meticulously planned trips with well-developed itineraries and precise schedules and sometimes you find a $400 flight to Copenhagen over spring break and don’t have even enough time to open your Lonely Planet before you leave for the airport. While I have managed to book a few places to stay and one train ticket across...
The long, steady decline of literary reading–The percentage of American adults who read literature — any novels, short stories, poetry or plays — fell to at least a three-decade low last year, according to a new report from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2015, 43 percent of adults read at least one work of literature in...
The Dangerous Safety of College–The moral of the recent melee at Middlebury College, where students shouted down and chased away a controversial social scientist, isn’t just about free speech, though that’s the rubric under which the ugly incident has been tucked. It’s about emotional coddling. It’s about intellectual...
| Black Like Who?, by Calvin Baker | Harper’s MagazineEdit”]
Delta might just be trolling me now, and I might have to admit to being a bit impressed. A few weeks ago, I noted my frustrations about a travel experience on a Delta flight from Helena to Istanbul, in which my the cancellation of my flight started a series of frustrations that basically haven’t come to an end. After a few weeks of...
For me, to remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off: the ones that made the sacrifice of the following day a trivial one. A good conversation is the only human equivalent: the realizing that decent points are being made and understood, that irony is in play, and elaboration, and that a dull...