by John L Micek

Tyrades! by Danny Tyree “There was shrinkage! Shrinkage!” - George Costanza For years, my various physicians let me skate by. I would dutifully (if trepidatiously) hop onto the scales for my weight assessment, but I was allowed to fudge on my Bo..

January 28, 2026

Trump’s Minneapolis carnage

It's been less than a week since federal agents murdered Alex Pretti, a registered nurse working in the intensive care unit at the Minneapolis VA Health Care System, which serves veterans. This was the second fatal shooting this month in Minneapolis..

January 27, 2026

The final report Trump is quietly trying to bury

Given what’s going on in Minnesota - another day, another ICE execution - it’s understandable few have noticed the latest authoritarian move to suppress vital information and deny us the right to judge it for ourselves. I want to revisit a chain..

January 26, 2026

No snow day for NYC kids

When I was a kid in the 1970s, no words broadcast on KDKA radio were sweeter than: “Bethel Park School District — closed.” The moment we heard them, we threw on our snow gear and headed for the sled slopes, determined to squeeze every free sec..

Landing Greenland: Top ten cartoons of the week

Thank goodness we're not going to invade Greenland. Now that's a sentence I never thought I'd have to write. At Davos, President Trump took military action off the table in his quixotic quest to take Greenland from Denmark. After all his bluster, the..

January 22, 2026

The Supreme Court needs to rein in California

It’s hard to have sympathy for people who choose to live in California. It’s their business, after all, if they want to be domiciled in a state where the taxes are crushing, the price of gasoline is out of sight, and the state government is teet..

Dirt, cheap

When my neighbor told me he could transform garbage into gold, I laughed. My neighbor is no alchemist. He didn’t even pass high school chemistry. The idea that he could make hamburger scraps into precious metals was hilarious, even to a seasoned j..

Remembering MLK should go well beyond a day

As has been customary for decades, millions of Americans celebrated the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. earlier this week. But his legacy goes well beyond a single day. Forty years ago, after one of the longest legislative battles in i..

January 21, 2026

Ready for a hotel on the moon?

Tyrades! by Danny Tyree “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They brunch with little green men.” - apologies to F. Scott Fitzgerald. According to the New York Post, a Silicon Valley startup company called GRU..

Casting a wary eye on Trump’s Greenland maneuvers

I studied the classical philosophers in college, including Plato, Socrates and Aristotle. But the most profound advice I’ve culled over a lifetime of scholarship has come from contemporary pop stars. The Beatles reminded me in a rather pithy way t..

January 20, 2026

Anti-ICE sentiment could spark a democratic rebirth. Or doom us further.

If we still lived in a rational democracy, the masked thugs in Trump’s ill-trained paramilitary force would be in full retreat. By wide margins in multiple polls (CNN, Quinnipiac, Economist/YouGov, Data for Progress), Americans say the fatal shoot..

The neighborhoods the silent generation built

I drove my 89-year-old mother through our old Pittsburgh neighborhood last Sunday. It was like many suburban neighborhoods that sprouted up across America in the 1960s and ’70s. Many of the people who moved there grew up in the city. They wanted m..

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