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.
Relationships are treated like Dixie cups. They are the same. They are disposable. If it does not work, drop it, throw it away, get another. Committed bonds (including marriage) cannot last when this is the prevailing logic. Most of us are unclear about what to do to protect and strengthen caring bonds when our self-centered needs are...
Art This week’s piece comes to us from the Louvre in Paris and is one of the most interesting sculptures I’ve seen. Named the Femme Voilée, it was created by Antonio Corradini, a Venetian Rococo sculptor, sometime during the 1700s. Link Roundup Poem Always Something More Beautiful by Stephen Dunn This time I came to the...
But they were tired old men who lacked the energy, will and imagination to deal with a crisis they knew was upon them. The decision-makers in the Kremlin were all in their late sixties or seventies and mostly in poor health. The Boss – more capo di capi than Tsar – was still Leonid Brezhnev, now seventy-six. The others all...
Art Guernica is a mural-sized canvas on oil painting by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso completed by June 1937.The painting, which uses a palette of gray, black, and white, is known as one of the most moving and powerful anti-war paintings in history. Standing at 11 feet tall and 25.6 feet wide, the large mural shows the suffering of...
This is a book I wish I had come across a decade or so ago. The unhappiness of men in relationships, the grief men feel about the failure of love, often goes unnoticed in our society precisely because the patriarchal culture really does not care if men are unhappy. When females are in emotional pain, the sexist thinking that says that...
Federal Disobedience: Why We Must Support Federal Worker Noncooperation–After 17 years at the US State Department, for example, TJ Lunardi decided to call it quits. Like other senior foreign service officers who, on January 25, 2017, left in what Washington Post journalist Josh Rogin characterized as an "ongoing mass exodus,"...
Probably funny to say that a commercial for a TV channel would make me more excited to visit Denmark over spring break, but it’s hard not to love this.
The Human Toll of Protecting the Internet from the Worst of Humanity–Henry Soto worked for Microsoft’s online-safety team, in Seattle, for eight years. He reviewed objectionable material on Microsoft’s products—Bing, the cloud-storage service OneDrive, and Xbox Live among them—and decided whether to delete it or report it to the...
People like Larraine lived with so many compounded limitations that it was difficult to imagine the amount of good behavior or self-control that would allow them to lift themselves out of poverty. The distance between grinding poverty and even stable poverty could be so vast that those at the bottom had little hope of climbing out even...