by John L Micek

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..

The civil rights pioneer history forgot

Note to editors: A version of this column was distributed for Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2025. He helped pave the way for Martin Luther King Jr. and others to end Jim Crow — but few know his name. So respected was this civil rights pioneer that..

January 16, 2026

Iran’s famine of the wise

In private conversations, U.S. officials often sound less confident than their public rhetoric suggests. Americans can pressure Tehran, but they can’t manufacture a legitimate Iranian leadership — and they know it. The danger is not only that th..

January 15, 2026

Dangerous data centers: Top ten cartoons of the week

With tech companies squeezing A.I.-powered tools into every product they can, energy-hungry data centers are popping up across the country to provide the necessary processing power. Our most popular cartoon this week, from the pen of John Cole, visua..

They still make TV commercials, don’t they?

Tyrades! by Danny Tyree I’m starting to realize that the faces I recognize in obituaries are outnumbering the new friends I make. And all my favorite TV commercials are locked in the distant past. Sure, I recognize Flo from the Progressive Insuran..

January 14, 2026

john-l-micek

Full Archive