Elizabeth Finch is a fictional creation with a talent for interpreting the past and teasing out it’s lessons for the present. But as brilliant as she was, she put none of her energies into worrying about the future and any legacy she could hypothetically leave. It makes you want to have known her.
Sci-Fi novels aim to be prophetic, the closer to the present time they’re situated the greater the likelihood that the prophesies will come about. It’s predictions that this piece is focused on, those that work out and those that don’t.
It’s hard these days to get a firm grip on what’s true and worth paying attention to and learning from. The same words can be appropriated by different political points of view to have completely opposing meanings. What to do? Who to believe?
A mental exercise in detailing how the rich differ from the rest of us. Of course, it’s money that makes them rich, but more importantly it’s money that importantly shapes who they are. The sad conclusion is that they are fundamentally not like us.
It must be that George Saunders knows a lot of people and also knows much about the quirks that drive them. He gets people. Fortunately, he’s bent to portraying his characters sympathetically, enough so that you can often read yourself into his stories
The Israel Palestine conflict is in 2025 in its most brutal phase yet. It’s a worst case example of the effects of rigid polarization turned savagely violent. Thousands are being killed and both sides are living at the edge of despair. It’s a testament to the inflexibility and moral failures of politicians who incense their populations into hate.
The Federal government is eliminating the TRIO program, which gives individual encouragement and support to first generation students intent on applying to and succeeding in college. TRIO has been especially successful at Shepherd University and its loss will hurt the university, the student body, and the community.
A rewrite of the article Help! There’s too many Republicans The rewrite includes some specifics relevant to Jefferson County.
George Saunders’s story collection Liberation Day disguises his scary themes under his usual inventive and even amusing narratives. His characters are completely imaginary and yet completely believable. It’s easy not just to see yourself in those characters, but to understand yourself better.
Part memoir, part discourse on American politics in 2025, part speculation. How all these themes connect in Germany, Poland, and the United States.
Speculation about how a self-avowed Christian president would stack up in the eyes of the Jesus he says he believes in.
Anne Enright’s novel, The Gathering, concerns the death by suicide of the narrator’s brother. The gathering refers to the mostly family mourners at the funeral. The suicide was conflicted, of course, but also described as the kind of person you search out for friendship. He reminded me also of my deceased partner.
Putting the control of government in the hands of a single political party is a singularly effective way of putting a brake on legislation that will benefit the electorate fairly. Today we’ve allotted so much power to Republicans that we’re at risk of weakening the foundations of our democracy. The battle against DEI is a case in point.
An appreciation of Howard Norman’s novel Come to the Window, with relevant tie ins to my own birth and disjointed trajectory into old age.
The lesson learned from trying to be something I was not; that is, an actor.
Tove Jansson’s book Sun City takes place in St. Petersburg, FL, a place I’ve had some dealings with through my parents’ retirement there. It got me reminiscing and then thinking about my own retirement.
Following an election there’s always a post mortem analysis by the losers about why they lost. The analysts need to find the flaws. And there are several places to look. At the candidates, the party, the voters, the messaging, or just because the time wasn’t right. .
The West Virginia Senate in the 2025 legislative session posted a bill to rescind a provision in a state law that prohibits industrial drilling in state parks. This is in the interest of allowing carbon sequestration in the parks.
What are the goals, probable benefits, and tactics for setting up a messaging campaign for a progressive political organization?
An appreciation of Howard Norman’s novel The Bird Artist with a side note or two of additional appreciation for the real artists of Change Islands, Newfoundland, where I lived idyllically for a while.
The Trump administration is playing fast and loose with the global friendships the United States has created and maintained for decades. What will be the effect of the U.S. losing those friends? Does the U.S. need friends anyway?
Anne Enright’s book The Wren, The Wren is a tale of modern Ireland’s evolution from a country under the heavy thumb of the Catholic church to its current secular culture. She tells the story through the lives of a loving dysfunctional family.
When is the best time to start engaging with the next following election? And a related question, when is the best time to try and convince someone to vote for your side?
The 2024 presidential election creates a scary picture of the future of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) for US democracy. We can speculate about what’s coming, but first the MAGA movement has to rebrand itself to something less scary.
West Virginia is losing its youth and becoming a state of older people. Our state, though, is actively trying to keep people out who could help reverse the outflow.
Claims made using superlative language can be convincing to some, while to others they are the mark of the snake oil salesman. It’s the old story of don’t believe what you know, believe what I say.
Book review of Tana French’s first Dublin Murder Squad series. A good read that offers up more than you’d expect from a murder mystery.
The Nobelist Kazuo Ishiguro pegged his book When We Were Orphans as not his best book. The jacket blurbs though were heaped with praise. It was an interesting difference of opinion to explore.
John Steinbeck published The Winter of Our Discontent in 1961. Like all his novels, it was rooted in the environment and in the time period in which he wrote it. It still speaks accurately, though, to the world of the mid 2020’s.
Black History Month has a half century history, since Gerald Ford inaugurated the celebration in 1976. Until 2025 the month was actively celebrated by our government. That has changed now in the emerging Trump dictatorship.
The accumulating wreckage of the second Trump administration and how his thoroughbred billionaires are abetting the devastation.
Diversity used to be a good word. It expressed ideas of openness, acceptance, fairness. It was something you wanted to support. It was something that defined America. But now diversity is under attack by the Republican party and is actively being legislated against in red states. It’s good vibes are being subverted and replaced by negative connotations.
People are guided in their voting choices by their underlying belief systems. Assuming that most people’s guides are kindly motivated, let’s assume that these guides are angels. What would be the difference, though, between a good Left bending angel politically versus one on the Right?
Billionaires, even though there are relatively few of them, are accumulating more and more wealth at the expense of the “little people” all 7 billion of them. They are increasingly getting involved politically for no good reason except to become trillionaires. Mother Earth is not pleased.
The intelligence of people who have a lot of it, maybe too much, is often applied in ways that sacrifice empathy. A case in point, the scientists of Los Alamos, who created the atom bomb. Another, the political scientists who created Project 2025.
Politics is a brain game in which the opposing players have to come up with strategies to persuade and convince voters. The game is played to a great extent with language wrapped up in signs and speeches. Social scientists understand more and more how to craft that language to be effective.
A fictional account of a restaurant owner who thinks much of his menu and disparages his competition. The tale is related through the person of a potential customer.
Bullying is widespread, even endemic, in American society. It’s a behavior that many of the powerful segments of society, including politicians, engage in.
Criticism of Governor Jim Justice blaming the Biden Administration for delays in highway construction in West Virginia.
A response to a local politician critical of US immigration policy, even though immigration would be a plus for West Virginia’s declining population.
With the advent of artificial intelligence, Medium, the writers’ collective is getting a lot of writers submitting articles using AI. This article explains why I don’t use AI to do my writing for me.
A history of the long process of coming out to my mother and the reasons she had to fear accepting me.
A thought exercise about where the differences between older and younger generations lie, with a focus on the situation in red state West Virginia.
An analysis (from a leftist perspective) of what the letters in the MAGA acronym stand for.
Douglas Murray’s book The madness of crowds is an antagonistic conservative reaction to identity politics, including gay men. This response is a consideration of why adopting a strong identity is necessary for groups to create strongly grounded individuals.
Democracy is becoming something of a dirty word among Christian conservatives, who would put their trust in the future of America as a theocracy. They are getting closer to achieving that goal in recent actions by certain courts. This attitude is becoming also a major platform plank of the Republican party.
Democracy has had a rough ride here in the U.S. In the hundred years from World War I to today, it has increased and declined. The misgivings that H.L. Mencken had about the workings of democracy as he saw it 50 years after the Civil War are still with us today.
The difference between conservatives and progressives or liberal and their electoral success or not is complicated. Lakoff attributes this to messaging and Haidt to moral differences.
Thinking about how our divided politics, which is so mixed up and tangled, that it looks similar to the kind of tangling that physicists and biologists deal with.
When is the right time to tell someone you’re gay? Two instances of when it was too late.