As is quickly becoming an annual tradition, media outlets are reporting widespread violence and general chaos in retail outlets across the nation as Americans pack into stores early in the morning in an effort to capitalize on the so-called “Black Friday” sales that begin the holiday shopping season. In Los Angeles, a woman injured twenty people when she used pepper spray in an effort to deter other shoppers and “gain preferred access to a variety of locations in the store,” in what police referred...

I was forwarded this story in an email: "In the line at the store, the check-out girl told an older man that he should bring his own grocery bags because plastic bags weren't good for the environment. The man apologized to her and explained, "We didn't have the green thing back in my day." The girl responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment." She was right -- our generation didn't have the green thing in its day.Back then, we returned...

Collective bargaining, what’s that?? Before last week, the only kinds of unions that showed up in the news were civil unions. Now, with the governor of Wisconsin calling for the end of collective bargaining for public employees of the state, signaling a move on the right towards targeting labor rights in general, unions are big news. While Democrat state senators have fled the state to avoid the quorum that Governor Scott Walker needs to pass his anti-union bill, President Obama has spoken out...

Spring’s first thaw warms the dead of winter with sour smells. Footsteps through slop, slabs of ice sliding off roofs, explosions in knee-deep muck, tufts of fur worn in the ground. When Molly Henry surveys the spring-time wretchedness of her Saskatchewan ranch in Wolf Willow, Wallace Stegner captures it well: “Matted, filthy, lifeless, littered, the place of her winter imprisonment was exposed, ugly enough to put gooseflesh up her backbone, and with a carrion smell over all of it.” Here in...

Nope, this is not an argument for the arming of Tucson citizens with Batarangs. There was a minor eruption in the blogospere recently over a decision by DC Comics to create a spin-off of Batman, to market in France, which would feature a “Muslim Batman.”  The storyline goes something like this: Bruce Wayne has decided to franchise his brand around the world, leading to the creation of Batman, Inc.  While in France, he finds Bilal Asselah, who is arrested after being caught...

The Baseball Hall of Fame remains perhaps the most venerated sports institution in the United States, filled not only with the greatest players in the sport’s long history, but also with virulent racists, noted cheaters, drug users, and your everyday run-of-the-mill sociopaths. The process and guidelines for selecting which former players deserve induction into the Hall of Fame are notoriously ambiguous and contentious, leading each year to hilariously...