2021-03-01 Social Lenses: “Room 2806” (Part II)
“Les affaires interdits” For the background to the following discussion, please see our previous post (“Room 2806” Part I). Below I try to isolate and classify the factors which led to the Manhattan...
View Article2021-03-18 What Went Wrong?
The West’s Failure to Vanquish Covid “This is a national emergency, this is a war that we’re in, and instead of putting generals in positions of power, we’ve deferred to academics. Imagine in World...
View Article2021-03-20 The Atlanta Shootings
Atlanta: Opening Pandora’s Box The criminalization and demonization of sex work has hurt and killed countless people–many at the hands of the police both directly and indirectly. Due to sexist...
View Article2021-04-05 The Pandemic and the Commons
The Social Discourse Commons In an increasingly class-stratified and politically-polarized society, whose values reign supreme? And where do those who disagree with those values go to dispute them?...
View Article2021-04-07 NYC Billionaires
Their Feelings Are Hurt “… New York City’s business leaders and wealthy residents have been feeling strangely unappreciated of late. Even disliked.” A piece in yesterday’s Financial Times (Joshua...
View Article2021-04-09 The American Jobs Plan: Water Infrastructure
Water is Our Most Precious Resource The American Jobs Plan – often referred to as the Biden Infrastructure Bill – totals around $2 trillion. There are myriad items in the bill, and we’re going to...
View Article2021-4-12 The American Jobs Plan: The Caregiving Infrastructure
$400 Billion for the Long-term Caregiving Infrastructure The American Jobs Plan, aka the Biden Infrastructure bill (note: as yet, not passed by Congress, so the final form will almost certainly change...
View Article2021-05-11 Environmental Injustice: Ecuador
The Most Important Environmental Justice Case You’ve Never Heard Of First, let’s acknowledge that it is extremely detrimental to the ongoing effort for justice for the people of Ecuador that the press...
View Article2021-05-18 Environmental Injustice Is Not a Theoretical Concept
A Form of Racism Which Requires Deeds, Not Words “Overlay a map of southern Louisiana’s petrochemical and petroleum plants with archival maps of the area’s plantations, and you’ll find that in many...
View Article2021-06-28 Structural Racism Lives
Structural Racism: The Long View A deliberately misapplied term, “critical race theory,” has recently begun tearing across the U.S., with numerous states (22 to date; the legislation has already...
View Article2022-01-28 Covid Revelations
Setting the Scene for a Public Health Catastrophe Over the past two years, successive waves of the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-19, “COVID” for short) – the Alpha, Delta, and now, Omicron variants – have...
View Article2022-01-31 Covid Revelations II: The Nursing Crisis
Where Have All the Nurses Gone? The issues involving crisis-level shortages of nurses and healthcare providers (for home health care, assisted living facilities) are somewhat different, although the...
View Article2022-02-04 Covid Revelations III: Long-Term Care Facilities
The Nursing Home Crisis In this, our third post covering the failures of the U.S. health/healthcare system over the past two years, we consider the case of nursing homes, the best-known and largest...
View Article2022-02-08 Covid Revelations IV: The Opioid Epidemic
The Pandemic and the Epidemic “If you’re alone, there’s nobody to give you the Narcan” “One prevailing theme is the fact that the epidemic now is driven by illicit fentanyl, fentanyl analogs,...
View Article2022-02-14 Valentine’s Day
Romantic and Other Forms of Love Some months ago, we vowed one day a month to post “on an upbeat note” in order to relieve the downbeat aura our writing exudes. Yesterday was the 13th – the date we’d...
View Article2022-02-26 Public Education & COVID-19
Part I: Why is Public Education Public? “…it’s hard to think of an education-related policy that has effectively and sustainably worked, beyond the granddaddy of all ed policy: a free, high-quality,...
View Article2022-03-05 Education in a Time of Pandemic II
Where Have All the Teachers Gone? Most American readers will be familiar with the euphemistically-termed “teacher shortage,” often presented in the media as an out-of-the-blue consequence of the...
View Article2022-03-25 Education in a Time of Pandemic III
Governance & Education Policy: Where Have All the Grown-ups Gone? “It’s just not one or two people here — there’s a mind-set coming from the governor on down to ban conversation and to segment...
View Article2022-03-28 Education in a Time of Pandemic IV
Prologue: What Education Cannot Do Before taking up the long list of public school crypto- (and not-so-crypto) privatization initiatives in our final installment concerning the consequences for public...
View Article2022-04-06 Interlude
The Story of Buzz and Janie and Danny It has been clear for some time that completing our series of planned posts on “Education in a Time of Pandemic” has become difficult, painful even. The final...
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