Christopher Orlet
Americans are used to the state forcing us to buy things. More than likely your state government forces you to purchase automobile insurance in order to operate your motorcar, just as you must buy a helmet to peddle your bicycle,…
My daddy, he made whiskey; my granddaddy, he did too. We ain’t paid no whiskey tax since 1792. — Albert Frank Bedoe This week the nation’s last illegal whiskey unit was shut down due to budget cuts. The team was based…
Of the countless reasons for our health care crisis, one, a lack of personal responsibility, has been getting short shrift. It certainly failed to get a single mention in President Obama’s health care speech last week. Likely it is because…
In the Netherlands one may badmouth or lampoon a group’s god or prophets, just not the group itself. Many European Muslims, however, would prefer to have it the other way around, and see this as a prime example of how…
Things the Grandchildren Should KnowBy Mark Oliver Everett (Little, Brown, 256 pages, $23.95) I’ll bet you can count the number of rock star autobiographies that delve into string theory and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics on one hand. I…
I have always felt a fondness for Richard Brautigan’s story “A Short History of Oregon,” with its Hemingwayesque language and its clever use of nostalgic understatement: I would do things like that when I was sixteen. I’d hitch-hike fifty miles in…
Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi Timothy R. Pauketat (Viking Adult, 208 pages, $22.95) I do not know how many times we visited Cahokia Mounds when I was a kid, but it had to be in the dozens….
I have ceased to count the number of times I’ve heard self-proclaimed experts say the 20th century, with its multitudinous (yes, they like words like multitudinous) genocides, holocausts and world wars, was the bloodiest, most violent century ever. Those who…
In Africa there are some conflicts that are simply too convoluted, too entangled to comprehend. Most are the result of a long history of violence and colonialism, timeless tribal and sectarian animosities, greed, corruption, intervention of foreign interests, and the…
