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.
Malcolm Gladwell on Why We Shouldn’t Value Speed Over Power–Not even Roger Federer could be a great tennis player without a coach, without a place to go and play tennis, without parents who drive him there. Roger Federer, for years, was known for having a terrible temper. At the beginning of his career he was thought to be someone...
Through the connection offered by Facebook, I learned some sad news this weekend that a classmate from high school had suffered a heart attack and, as a result, had been placed in a medically-induced coma. At a time in my life when I still like to pretend that I am as young and spry as I was in high school, the news came as a tremendous...
To feel safe, you need to control what the people around you are going to say and do. This is not achieved by going after the root causes of violence. This is not even achieved by working to slowly improve social conditions. It is achieved through silence and disappearance, by moving the offending object or person out of sight. . . ...
Why men rape–Such was the lamentable state of affairs when the feminist activist Susan Brownmiller introduced her ground-breaking feminist work on rape Against Our Will (1975) with the dictum: ‘[Rape] is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.’ Brownmiller...
“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...
