January 29th, 2020
“On January 16, 1979, the self-styled ‘King of Kings’ (the Shah of Iran) was…forced to seek exile abroad. To understand the reason for this unexpected dénouement, it is necessary to note that the Shah was essentially a western creation. Once before he had been forced into exile, in 1953, when he tried to oppose a popular (democratically elected and anti-Communist) Prime Minister, Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq, who had nationalized the oilfields at the expense of (the) Anglo-Iranian Oil…
January 15th, 2020
by Karen Anderson
kartcone@gmail.com
Congratulations to the Fargo School District for opening up a discussion regarding today’s students as covered in the January 7, Barry Amundson article “Social, emotional learning a forefront of Fargo's State of the Schools.” I am a twenty year educator of students ranging in age PreK-16; I have seen a change in how students learn and an increase in their non-academic needs. Contemporaneously within the last decade schools have addedto their…
December 23rd, 2019
By Zach Nerpel
zachnerpel@gmail.com
Doom chimes all around us and I feel a greedy sense of relief understanding the real possibility I will be here when it all ends. What greater gift than to be a part of the very last chapter of humanity? The only question is, how exactly will we come to pass?
Will we burn as they are in Australia? Will we drown or be swept away by tidal waves like small, Oceanic islands and litter the deep seafloor like several oily Atlantis? Will it be climate at all?…
December 11th, 2019
By Waylon Hedegaard
retiringwithcats@gmail.com
When I think about grandmothers, I think of a kindly woman with a plate of cookies in an old fashioned kitchen, but I’m not sure why. For my grandmother, none of this was even remotely true.
Except for the cookies. There were always cookies. Sometimes they even had sugar… but that’s another story.
My grandmother lived on a farm in Eastern Montana. She was small but tough, that ornery kind of tough that makes those around her nervous, and…
December 4th, 2019
By Zach Nerpel
zachnerpel@gmail.com
What fugue was this which ferried me from Fall into our now and immediately miserable Winter? Where had I been this entire season? How much time had passed and what had I experienced? What had I learned?
The last time I had written to this publication, it was about unfulfilling and wasted Summers. How fitting it is, then, that Fall was so meaningless itself that I never felt the need to relieve myself on paper the entire period?
But was it so…
December 4th, 2019
“Because oil and gas are found all over the freaking place…companies need a rudimentary foreign policy to maximize…their ability to produce their product; (they need)…stability, access, control, simplicity. Countries may come and go, but oil and gas companies need to think bigger than that: …so the longer the relevant foreign ruler is in power, the better. And if the local autocrat is …on the payroll, no one’s going to bother anyone about cleaning up any mess that oil production…
November 13th, 2019
Gary Olson
olsong@moravian.edu
Over the past few months President Trump has unilaterally by Tweet and telephone began to dismantle the U.S. military’s involvement in the Middle East. The irony is amazing, because in a general overarching narrative sense, this is what the marginalized antiwar movement has been trying to do for decades. — John Grant (1)
Prof. Harry Targ, in his important piece “United States foreign policy: yesterday, today, and tomorrow,” (MR online, October 23,…
November 13th, 2019
By Amido Jusu
amidujusu@live.com
As much as I wanted someone else—especially a woman of color—to write such an article, I also felt like it needed to be said urgently. The kind of misogyny Clifford Joseph Harris Jr. (commonly known as T.I.) engaged in regarding his daughter’s virginity is a sin that has been plaguing black men in America since the inception of racist ideas that essentially defined both black masculinity and black femininity. It will continue to be a sin unless it’s…
October 9th, 2019
By William Southworth
wsouthwo@cord.edu
The United Kingdom has a new boss.
Considered to by some to be a British counterpart to Trump, Boris Johnson is riding a wave of political discontent with a can-do attitude and bubbly stage persona. He opened his inaugural speech with a powerful and politically charged promise.
After ‘three long years of indecision’ this new Prime Minister´s government will deliver Brexit with or without a deal by the 31st of October. He will do this by simply…
October 2nd, 2019
“In the middle of Europe in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered some fourteen million people…This is a history of political mass murder. The fourteen million were all victims of a Soviet or Nazi killing policy, often of an interaction between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, but never casualties of the war between them…The distinction between concentration camps and killing sites cannot be made perfectly: people were executed and people were…
By Josette Ciceronunapologeticallyanxiousme@gmail.com What does it mean to truly live in a community —or should I say, among community? It’s a question I have been wrestling with since I moved to Fargo-Moorhead in February 2022.…