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Grassroots: Capitalism’s Intertwined Ills
Column Preview: Climate, Migration, Reaction Are Not Isolated Problems
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Grassroots: Capitalism’s Intertwined IllsColumn Preview: Climate, Migration, Reaction Are Not Isolated Problems
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. used to describe three evils as he attempted to link the main issues facing the nation and its most oppressed people: racism, violence, and poverty. King’s argument was that the three were linked, that they operated as the three stools of a White Supremacist stool. His definitions of racism might have seemed obvious — as a civil rights leader, he obviously was demanding justice and equality for Black Americans, but he also saw racism playing out on the international stage, including in Vietnam and Africa where non-whites were being subjected to violent rule by colonial powers. Violence meant police violence and military violence (See “Beyond Vietnam”), and poverty was both economic and a form of racist control and violence. These three evils were connected. Sadly, we have never fully embraced King’s argument, and we now are dealing with additional evils — racism, violence, and poverty, to be sure, but also environmental decay and climate change, and widespread forced migration and internal displacement — that are intertwined and driving us to calamity. That is the focus of my upcoming column for The Progressive Populist, which I include below for paying subscribers to this newsletter. My last column was “Save the Humanities.”
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Grassroots Preview: A Defining Moment
The Right Wants Control of Our Identities and Women’s Bodies
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Save the Humanities
This is an advance copy for paying subscribers of this newsletter of an upcoming Grassroots column for The Progressive Populist. My last column was “A Defining Moment.”
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Save the Humanities
This is an advance copy for paying subscribers of this newsletter of an upcoming Grassroots column for The Progressive Populist. My last column was “A Defining Moment.” Fairleigh Dickinson University is closing its low-residency creative writing MFA. It no longer fits within the university’s mission, officials say, and it now joins a list of shuttered programs that deserved better. I received my MFA in 2012.. It was an important part of my writing growth and planted the seeds for my shift into creative nonfiction (I’m still a poet). I’m a better writer and teacher because of the experience. To many, creative writing programs might seem unnecessary, catering to navel-gazers and elites while doing little to improve job prospects. This is not only wrong — writers and artists in these programs come from various backgrounds and cut across racial, class, and gender lines — but misses the larger picture.
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Press Critique: More Word Choice Follies
Passing Opinion Off as Neutral Reporting is Bad Writing
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Press Critique: More Word Choice FolliesPassing Opinion Off as Neutral Reporting is Bad Writing
Today’s lesson on word choice comes from The Washington Post, which published a story advancing a speech in which Vice President — and Democratic presidential nominee — Kamala Harris was set to unveil price controls designed to manage the cost of groceries. The Post — like The New York Times — appears to be asking their reporters to become more creative in their writing. The upshot is not a more interesting approach to storytelling, but the kind of overwriting and overly broad — and cliched — categorizing that should raise questions of bias among readers. This kind of journalistic writing drives me crazy. It pretends at objectivity but uses language that is not so subtly presents the writer’s point of view. Adjectives and adverbs — and most other qualifiers — insert the writer into the story. They imply point of view.
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