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.
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...
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...