When John Keegan died on August 2, 2012, it escaped me — I’m embarrassed to admit that I was unaware of his existence. Keegan, a lecturer in military history of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and later military affairs editor at the Telegraph, wrote influential books on military history designed to appeal to the […]
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A league of their own: S&R honors Lavonne “Pepper” Paire-Davis (and baseball-playing women everywhere)
Walt Whitman once said, “I see great things in baseball. It’s our game, the American game. It will repair our losses and be a blessing to us.” You could look it up. – Annie Savoy My grandfather used to tell stories about his sister, my aunt Janie. She played baseball. Not softball, but baseball. And […]
S&R Honors: Ivan Toms and Lawrie Schlemmer – what we were we still are
Waiting for a miracle “How long are you prepared to wait?” I asked. It was 1991 in the Eastern Cape city of Port Elizabeth and I was in my final year of high school. Nelson Mandela had been released in 1990 with me hovering over the television, my camera on a tripod, in a futile […]
S&R Honors Richard Joshua Reynolds: Self-interest, rightly understood, and our legacy of progressive capitalism
This is a song Charles Manson stole from the Beatles. We’re stealing it back. – Bono When we hear talk about “markets” and “capitalism” and “business,” especially as such things are fetishized in the corporate media (think about how The Apprentice franchise has apparently made Donald Trump, a barking conspiracy theorist whose companies have declared bankruptcy […]
How can we clone Paul Farmer?
If I could be someone else, who would I be? Oh, I don’t know, how about someone brilliant—say, someone who grew up poor, but through sheer brilliance and effort got himself to Duke, say, on full scholarship, and then Harvard Medical School. But I’d also want to be someone who wanted to, say, do good […]
Remembering Abigail Adams
(Part two of two) “Remember the ladies,” Abigail Adams wrote in a letter to her husband during his service in the Continental Congress. And those words are how we now most often remember her: “Remember the ladies.” And John did. He pined for her. His long public career—in the Continental Congress, as a minister in […]
Remembering John Adams
(Part one of two) When Abigail Adams died in late October, 1818, her husband, John, brokenhearted, said, “I wish I could lie down beside her and die, too.” Today, the two are entombed side by side, along with their son John Quincy and his wife, Louisa Catherine, in a well-lit, whitewashed crypt beneath the United […]
Ray Bradbury: "Live forever!"
“Live forever!” Mr. Electro told him. Ray Bradbury was twelve years old and had just seen Mr. Electro get strapped to the electric chair at the traveling carnival. Someone threw the switch. Mr. Electro got electrocuted. It was Labor Day weekend, 1932. After the show, after his recovery, Mr. Electro took the young Bradbury aside. […]
The Cool of a Generation: S&R honors Maurice Sendak
by Deb Caponera If there could be any one person responsible for the “cool” of my generation, and well, all those to follow, it would be Maurice Sendak. But his influence goes far beyond what hip, creative things he inspired in us 40-somethings with his array of stories and pictures. He wasn’t just a children’s […]
Wondering with Mark Twain
I wonder what Twain is thinking as he stands there atop the granite steppes of the pedestal. Surely he’d chuckle if he could see himself that way, raised up like that, though it’d please his ego, too. The statue stands next to a well-manicured lawn at the heart of Elmira College in Elmira, NY—the town […]
Mark Twain and public discourse
The prevailing argument among our brilliant crew of writers here at S&R lately over our public discourses v. those of our opponents goes something like this: some of us want to take the high road in public discussion of the issues; some of us want to go into the same attack dog mode that our […]
Muhammad Ali turns 70: Happy Birthday, Champ
“I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong… No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.”
Honoring Langston Hughes
I first met Langston Hughes in 1990. He’d been dead some twenty-three years by then, and I was a few months shy of my twenty-first birthday. We met almost by accident. It was January, and the country’s eyes were on football. The NFL had moved Super Bowl XXVII from Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe, Arizona, […]
Freddie Mercury
In 1995, only a year after South Africa’s first democratic election, I was working at a community centre in Nyanga, a shanty-town alongside Cape Town’s international airport. The centre had started a project which aimed to give HIV-positive single mothers a safe place to live and work. My self-appointed task was to assist with setting […]
S&R Honors
Click here to learn more about past honorees...- IRS/Tea Party controversy: progressive groups “targeted,” too, and corporate media once again refuses to tell Americans the whole truth
- “Useful Enemies”: U.S. admitted not just Nazis after WWII, but their sadistic collaborators
- The time a source has to respond to request for comment? Virtually none.
- Profiling the Tea Party: In defense of the IRS. Sorta. Or not.
- Saturday Video Roundup: “Imagine the Band,” by John Lennon and Wings
- Mystery Unraveled: How a white, moderate, married, churchgoing, middle-class, middle-aged woman could vote for Obama
- An open letter to Burt Rutan, regarding his WSJ commentary on human-caused climate disruption
- Meet the men of Match.com: Really, guys, are you serious?
- Climate scientists still besieged
- Pelosi on Bush: “He’s not worth impeaching”
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Brian Angliss: That would be the same Fox News that won a lawsuit…
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Samuel Smith: Thank you for making clear that you believe FOX to…
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Bman: Not even close. If the number of groups target wer…
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Otherwise: interesting and yet another example of faux news m…
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Autumn: You said several organizations have purposed alter…
