Werner Herzog's recent film, "Into the Abyss" is now available on On Demand on cable television, waiting for anyone interested in the death penalty to come to it. The film concerns a triple murder in Conroe, Texas, one in which two young men, Michael Perry and Jason Burkett, murdered a… Read full post »

  This past month's issue of the Atlantic featured a cover story titled, "Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?" written by Stephen Marche. In it, Mr. Marche carefully delineates the ways in which Facebook and other social networking sites are actually separating people from each other even as they are… Read full post »

  Just this past week, the Huffington Post announced their creation of "GPS for the Soul: A Killer App for Better Living," an app to be launched this June which is designed to lead people toward supposedly healthier, wiser, more soulful living. According to Arianna Huffington, the new app will a… Read full post »

  Particularly with Ron Paul's long-term campaign for President, in both this election cycle and the last, the idea of libertarianism has frequently been bandied about in the press; with it often being defined as the attempt to be certain that federal and state governments do not impede individu… Read full post »

  As everyone now knows, the incident involving Trayvon Martin, the young black teenager who was shot to death in Sanford, Florida by a Hispanic man named George Zimmerman, has been everywhere on cable television. For a while there, it seemed as if both MSNBC and CNN covered almost nothing else,… Read full post »

  John Wayne, as Ethan Edwards, after returning his missing niece to her parents, walks out of their cabin into the solitude and space of Monument Valley in John Ford's "The Searchers." Robert DeNiro, as Travis Bickle, willfully drives away in his taxi from Betsy, the girl he once pursued and… Read full post »

  Recently, a number of parents who have been homeschooling their children for various reasons are asking that their teenagers be allowed to compete in athletics at the local high school without necessarily attending it. Obviously, this question - and the natural divide between groups of parents… Read full post »

  Currently, as many as 20 states are considering enacting parent trigger laws, those which would allow parents who are dissatisfied with the way their children's school is being run, to turn it into a charter school, replace the staff, or even shut it down if 51 percent of the school's… Read full post »

  On his HBO show this past Friday, comedian Bill Maher inserted himself into this year's presidential dialogue by critcizing Rick Santorum for homeschooling his children for primarily religious reasons, and referring to the Santorum home as a "Christian madrassa." During his comments concerning… Read full post »

  Recently, William Johnson, a public high school special education teacher in Brooklyn wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times, "Confessions of a 'Bad' Teacher," in which he described how his classroom performance had been rated unsatisfactory following an incident in which one of the stude… Read full post »

  It was revealed recently that the Heartland Institute, a conservative non-profit organization in Chicago, has begun a campaign to combat the teaching of climate change in the public schools. According to leaked internal documents obtained from the organization and spread on the Internet, Heart… Read full post »

  Just this week, another school shooting occurred, this one at a high school in suburban Cleveland, Ohio, in which five students were shot, three of them fatally. Almost predictably, the shooter was a seventeen year old boy who was described as a nice quiet kid who lived with his grandparents,… Read full post »

  This past week, following the death of pop diva Whitney Houston, cable news viewers were inundated with reports of her death, both how she died and who might be responsible. In fact, the coverage was virtually non-stop on CNN's evening reports, just as the death of Michael Jackson was a… Read full post »

  Following a report in the New York Times last month, there have been numerous reports, in the Times itself as well as on CNN and in UK's Observer of unsafe working conditions and worker abuses in various plants producing Apple products in China. During one particularly harrowing incident last… Read full post »