The Highroad
Tilling our public treasury
Some aspects of American agriculture are quite odd. For example, to meet a farmer these days, there’s no need for you to venture out to the hinterland — because thousands of them actually are city slickers...
The real Halloween scaries of 2014
If you want a real Halloween fright, don’t look for it among the trick-ortreaters coming to your door— just check out the Republican spooks tying to peddle panic in this political year...
How many working-class populists are in Trump’s new government?
Actor Jack Nicholson says he finally understood the meaning of the word irony when his mother called him a “son of a bitch.” ...
Getting to know the right wing
Time for another edition of the new game that’s sweeping the nation: “Who’s That Right Winger?” An interconnected network of extremely wealthy, far-right-wing individuals are quietly pushing their ideological, corporatist and plutocratic agenda all across America...
The corporate purchase of governmental power
Jamie Dimon of New York City made a donation to the New York Police Foundation this spring. “These officers,” Mr. Dimon said at the time, “put their lives on the line every day to keep us safe...
A new face of political goofiness
At last, our embarrassment is over! We Texans have long endured the shame of having our goober of a governor, Rick Perry, declaimed as the goofiest public official in the land. But now, we can point to another state’s embarrassment, for a newly elected senator has ...
What’s in Trump’s food-box?
Even Charles Dickens, England’s masterful satirist of the Victorian upper class, couldn’t have imagined elite rulers using a box of food as a gratuitous...
Front porch politics
If you despair that a mysterious plague of incurable political knuckleheadism has swept our country, turning previously progressive white working-class people into mindless Trump...
Food manipulators trying to deceive voters
An old adage says, “Never buy a pig in a poke.” But what about a poke hidden in a pig...
A tomato tale that’s hard to stomach
"I’m 98 percent confident we can make a tomato that tastes substantially better,” Professor Harry Klee recently exulted to The New York Times...
Who are the serial killers of America’s newspapers?
In a recent two-panel cartoon, a character holds a sign saying: “First they came for the reporters.” In the next panel, his sign says:...
Snuggling with an oil pipeline
Both the old and new media agree on this: If you need a story that’s guaranteed to be popular — go with animals. Kute kittens, for example, or the P-group of puppies, porpoises, penguins and polar bears...
