Mike Pilewski writes about life, politics and culture in the United States
Among the aging paperbacks on my bookshelf is a thin volume from 1963 by Martin Luther King, Jr., called Why We Can’t Wait. King wrote this nearly 10 years into a civil-rights movement whose origin he placed in a Supreme Court decision in 1954. The book came years after the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott and several marches King had organized. … >>
The recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, have played out in a way that only Quentin Tarantino could have imagined. Tarantino’s films, which are very violent, often tell their story from more than one perspective. Scenes are not shown in the usual order. Key information is presented after the fact, reversing whatever conclusions one may have drawn up to that point. … >>
During the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan had some frank words for the American people. The manufacturing economy, he said, was on its way out. Rather than try to keep it alive artificially, the US would cultivate a service economy. This was an excellent use of semantics. “Service” sounds good. It carries an air of politeness and efficiency and wish fulfillment. … >>
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. … >>
If you tried to read the English-language Wikipedia last Wednesday, you couldn’t. Every page was replaced with a black screen explaining that, as part of a protest, the content of the free online encyclopedia was being hidden for 24 hours. (A banner appeared at the top of Wikipedia’s Spanish- and German-language pages, but this was hardly more distracting than the … >>
The word of the moment is “occupy”. It means so many useful things. You can ask someone: “Is this seat occupied?”, meaning “Is someone sitting here?” Rooms in a hotel can be occupied (meaning used or inhabited), as can office space in a building: “The Pilewski Tower has 70 percent occupancy.” You can be occupied, meaning you have something to … >>
Picture this: Last October, a group of American exchange students is walking through a pedestrian plaza in downtown Wiesbaden late at night. Suddenly, they’re approached by a gang of young ethnic Turks who don’t like the fact that one of the students is speaking English. “Hey!” the gang leader barks at him. “You’re American, aren’t you?” “Keep walking, Sam,” I … >>
“I wonder where we go when we die,” Calvin, the cartoon character, says to his friend Hobbes. Hobbes guesses: “Pittsburgh?” Calvin asks, “You mean if we’re good or if we’re bad?” The emptiness of that medium-sized city during the G-20 conference last week made me think I’d missed the Rapture or maybe the swine flu. Imagine everyone gone, except for … >>
Halloween has come early to Pittsburgh this year. The decorations are already up on the neighbors’ houses: jack o’ lanterns, dried cornstalks and scarecrows are scaring away evil spirits five and a half weeks before October 31. The Halloween colors, orange and black, have also appeared a lot downtown. They’re used on signs that announce road construction, detours and inconveniences … >>
Going to a gym has many obvious benefits, but also some that are not obvious. For example, at my gym you can watch six television screens, each showing a different channel, at the same time. It’s something I can’t do at home. So there I was the other night, dividing my attention between news reports about Iran and my favorite … >>