Barak Obama is not a black version of John Kennedy. He is a pathetic but apparently successful attempt to repackage tired political hackery as this season’s hot new reality show. And yet, he is not what is wrong with American Politics.
Hillary Clinton is a nakedly ambitious, calculatingly manipulative career politician who wants to create [...]
DEKALB, Ill. (AP) — Steven Kazmierczak had the look of a boyish graduate student — except for the disturbing tattoos that covered his arms. Professors and students knew him as a bright, helpful scholar, but his past included a stint in a mental health center.
The 27-year-old Kazmierczak also had a history of mental illness and [...]
Several large properties in the East End of Watertown, including a nearly 12-acre swath of land at Greenough Boulevard and Arsenal Street that was once used to burn depleted uranium from a Watertown Arsenal nuclear reactor, are undergoing close scrutiny to determine how badly contaminated they are and who is responsible for cleaning them up.
The [...]
We awoke this morning at the crack of dawn, 6 am, when the weak sunlight seeped through the as yet unspring-cleaned dingy window. We lay in bed thinking about aquatic mammals – specifically, why they don’t die of thirst. Can they live, unlike other mammals, without fresh water? Do they somehow desalinize salt water? Do [...]
A part-time Boston University student who hosts a popular video game review show on an MTV Web site allegedly sent an e-mail threatening to kill an ex-girlfriend and recreate the Virginia Tech bloodshed at her school, according to a Boston police report obtained by the Herald.
“(I)’m gonna (expletive) bring a gun to your school and [...]
We’ve been hearing this crap for far too long. American education is going to the dogs. Test scores are down across the board, in Reading and Writing and Rithmatic. On a list of Average National Test Scores the US is stuck somewhere between Liberia and Lesotho.
As an educator, parent and keen observer of youth culture, [...]
Doing a little after-holiday shopping, in preparation for our own personal Christmas, as celebrated by the Church of the Latter Day Savings, we noticed a couple of changes to the most fundamental facet of the holidays, as celebrated in America – shopping itself.
First of all, there seems to be a dearth of deep-cut after Christmas [...]
Over the past several weeks the Dowbrigade has seen
a sea change in his feelings about what is happening, and what will
happen next, in the Middle East. We no longer see an intractable long-term struggle and
[...]
It seems that each decade these days can
be associated with a particular kind of crime. The 80’s was rife with
muggings, in the 90’s carjacking was all the rage, and now, in the brave
[...]
Feelings of empathy lead to actions of helping -
but only between members of the same group – according to a recent
study in the July issue of Personality
[...]
Although the Dowbrigade has sworn a blood oath not
to blog about the institution for which we work, or any of the people
we work with, or any of the students we teach, have taught in the past
[...]
Although the Dowbrigade long ago moved beyond the
strict causality of Freud’s theories of sexual repression and psychoses,
we are astounded at times by how much of what really motivates people,
consciously and subconsciously, [...]