Mike Pilewski writes about life, politics and culture in the United States
“That’s such an American attitude!” my friend said, giving me a hostile look. For a moment I wondered if our cozy rendezvous in an Erfurt café was coming to a sudden end. All I’d done was offer a friendly suggestion, but it was one that clearly went against everything she believed in. Nadine (not her real name) had been talking … >>
For a week now, much of America has been obsessed with two questions. These questions are not “What has happened to Mitt Romney?” (he has hardly been seen since the election) nor “Will Barack Obama’s second term be different from his first?” No, what many Americans want to know is: Will they still be able to buy Twinkies? And if … >>
One of the highlights of my USA ’08 Special Report for Spotlight Online was a review of all the different music videos that expressed the election campaign in song. Will.i.am’s “Yes, We Can” video, along with Barelypolitical’s Obama Girl series, started an avalanche of user-made songs and parodies about all the candidates that kept us entertained for a year. There … >>
Every recent US president was elected by a minority — one quarter, at most one third, of the population. That’s because nearly half of the Americans who could vote don’t vote. I’ve been meeting Americans who tell me they won’t be voting this November. The candidates don’t speak to their needs; the system is too corrupt; promises are made to … >>
There was a time when I could have been a consul or an ambassador. No joke. An American consul in Germany said I had the makings of a diplomat, and he tried hard to convince me to join the foreign service. It was a tempting offer: excellent pay, a high level of responsibility, and an opportunity to see the world. … >>
What if your teacher did not come to school? In Chicago, 350,000 students at public schools don’t have to ask this question, because it is reality for them: 26,000 teachers across the city are on strike. For the teachers and their employer, the city, this is purely a labor dispute. But to onlookers, it raises more general questions about the … >>
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” — George Santayana, Spanish-American philosopher, in The Life of Reason (1905) Seven years to the day after America’s worst natural disaster, history almost repeated itself. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina had crossed Florida and the Gulf of Mexico, hitting New Orleans and devastating large parts of Louisiana and Mississippi. Last … >>
As children in America, we learned an English nursery rhyme that begins: “There was an old woman who lived in a shoe. She had so many children she didn’t know what to do.” This description is unfortunately a lot more current than it sounds. According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, 44 percent of American children live in … >>
There have been three generations of Batman on the screen. There was the comedic Batman of 1966–68 (one of the first TV series in color); the movie Batman of 1989–97 (which suffered from a lot of bad acting); and the dark Batman of 2005–12 (which explores the origins of the title character). Inspiration came from the original Batman comic from … >>
Can you throw away books? Many of us can’t. Good books are like old friends. We appreciate the amount of time someone took to write these stories and set them on paper. We want to make sure our books are taken care of. If there’s no more room on our shelves (because we’ve made new friends), we go looking for … >>