Mike Pilewski writes about life, politics and culture in the United States
I’m sure you’ve heard that on Monday afternoon, local time, horrible things happened in Boston. Near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, two bombs went off, killing three people and hitting perhaps 200 more with shrapnel. Doctors have said they “had to finish the work of the bombs”, performing amputations on a number of the injured. Horrible, horrible stuff. … >>
Few things are certain in this world, but there’s one prediction I can make: When the Mayan apocalypse comes and goes this weekend, life will continue as it always has. Unfortunately for the United States, this means that mall shoppers, moviegoers and schoolchildren will be gunned down on a regular basis. It sounds cruel and cynical of me to say … >>
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 … >>
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 … >>
New Mexico is on fire. Again. It seems like only last year that we heard reports about… Wait. It was just last year. The difference is that back then, most of the fire was across the state border in Arizona, and it was called the largest fire in Arizona history. This year, it’s mostly in New Mexico, and it’s considered … >>
You’ve just turned 17. You’re at your dad’s fiancée’s house, watching a basketball game. There’s a break, so you take a walk out to the local convenience store to buy some Skittles and a can of iced tea. On your way back, you notice a stranger in a car is watching you. You walk away from him, but he follows … >>
One of the brilliant themes in George Orwell’s classic novel 1984 is the way that the government of Oceania always succeeds in distracting people from the real problems they face — like shortages and malnutrition. When cocoa supplies are disrupted, for example, the government is forced to cut each individual’s chocolate ration from 30 grams a week to 20. But … >>
I have mixed feelings about this. The stated purpose of this column is to explain what America is really like, not to dwell on its extreme aspects. For example, I try to convince you that most Americans do not walk around carrying guns. But then something like this happens: once again, some deranged kid has brought a gun to school … >>