by DJ | Dec 8, 2019 | Blog, Impeachment
What is it about some coal miners daughters that occasionally yields such admirable flintiness? I confess to developing a fondness in my early 20s, while living in Texas, for classic C&W music. It was probably motivated by an affinity for Willie Nelson, longneck...
by DJ | Nov 26, 2019 | Blog, Book Review, Issues
One of the most influential books in my former life as a potential historian was James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Published in 1941 with multiple accompanying photographs by Walker Evans, it documented the devastation of our Depression by focusing on the...
by DJ | Nov 26, 2019 | Blog, Election Central, Legislative Watch
“Having served at the municipal and county levels, I understand the unique needs of our mountain communities.” Ron Mau, Smoky Mountain News, November 18, 2019. Yes, Ron Mau has announced that he will enter the Republican primary race for the North Carolina House of...
by DJ | Oct 18, 2019 | Blog
The Atlantic (November, 2019); 42-49 Mark Bowen’s article is subtitled: “What Top Military Officers Really Think about Trump.” He divides his critique into five categories, each of which should make you shiver a tad. First, President Trump “disdains expertise.” We...
by DJ | Oct 18, 2019 | Blog
From the US Congressman Thom Tillis Twitter Feed: “It’s easy to sleep knowing that Justice Brett Kavanaugh serves on our Supreme Court, upholding our Constitution and protecting our values.” Yes, indeed, I sleep better knowing the man who, as an adolescent, bragged...
by DJ | Oct 18, 2019 | Blog
According to US Congressman Thom Tillis, Impeachment is “a waste of resources.” Lawmakers need to focus on our economy rather than shift “resources away from what I don’t believe rises to the level of any kind of impeachment inquiry or impeachment.” One very...
by DJ | Oct 18, 2019 | Blog
We were an idea, before we were a nation. Our borders were of less concern to our founders than a constellation of what were then almost unspeakable notions, like all men were created equal and they had, inherently, certain rights. Those rights were not granted by a...
by DJ | Oct 18, 2019 | Blog
The arrival of a new movie about the last months of Judy Garland’s life started me thinking about my first encounters with her professional work. It was all those “Let’s put on a show” movies with Mickey Rooney. You’d rush to your neighbor’s house after school (they...
by DJ | Oct 18, 2019 | Blog
At Governor’s School, where I taught for several summer, a famous computer scientist from MIT was once a guest speaker. I’m talking a name that was off the charts in his field. Yet, early in his lecture he completely lost his audience of high schoolers, when he...
by DJ | Oct 18, 2019 | Blog
Organ Pipe Cactus National Park is in Arizona. It contains some of the oldest plants in the United States and is one of our globe’s most fragile eco-systems. Home to Saguaro and Pipe Cacti, it also houses at least 22 archeological sites. Its existence is so rare and...
by DJ | Oct 7, 2019 | Blog
Barn Dance – Yee Haw!
by jane | Jun 13, 2018 | Blog
Golf and Hurricanes: a Story of Two Sets of Numbers By Penny Smith In an age of truthiness, even numbers lie. Well, one could argue they have always concealed facts (see Mark Twain: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”). Yet the skewed...
by jane | Jun 13, 2018 | Blog
By Penny Smith One day there is going to be a summit. And then there’s not. No, wait, wait, after an exchange of biting comments, delayed responses and letters (one 8½x11 size and one, judging from the envelope, bigly), there will be a summit. So, cue that Nobel Prize...
by jane | Jun 13, 2018 | Blog
By Penny Smith Both of these pieces are printed in the latest issue of The Atlantic magazine. The first one is the cover story, has gotten a little play around on the web and goes a long way toward explaining resentment about “the elite.” The second is a casual essay...
by jane | May 30, 2018 | Blog
By Penny Smith One of the most powerful books I’ve ever read is James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which came with equally powerful photographs by Walker Evans. Eschewing traditional journalism, Agee distills the experiences of tenant farmers during the...
by jane | May 30, 2018 | Blog
By Penny Smith James Comey, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership. New York, 2018. The number of Americans who, as children, heard the phrase “I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them, Sam-I-am” surely outnumbers those who managed to avoid one of...
by jane | May 17, 2018 | Blog
By Penny Smith Ezra Kline, one of the more thoughtful of our newest generation of political analysts and founder of the web site VOX, recently penned an interesting article on our current climate of democratic despair: “American Democracy has faced worse threats than...
by jane | May 16, 2018 | Blog
By Penny Smith The most recent New Yorker (May 14, 2018) contains an extended essay on the Reverend William Barber (“The Southern Strategist” by Jelani Cobb, pp. 68-75), written by a fan. However, if you have ever heard Barber speak or have read transcripts of those...
by jane | May 16, 2018 | Blog
By Penny Smith Daniel S. Pierce, Hazel Creek: The Life and Death of an Iconic Mountain Community. Gatlinburg, TN: Great Smoky Mountains Association, 2017. When I first moved to western North Carolina I naively thought that I could compile a definitive...
by jane | May 16, 2018 | Blog
By Penny Smith Because I have an inexplicable fondness for American Pickers, I’m privy to advertisements for another History Channel Show, Swamp People. Set in the Atchafalaya Basin in Louisiana, it’s a reality show about alligator hunters. Given my attraction to most...
by jane | May 16, 2018 | Blog
By Penny Smith Friday was a difficult day for Margaret, my partner with dementia. So I decided we needed to spend Saturday doing something she still likes to do – ride through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, accompanied by the two terriers, in search of...
by jane | May 16, 2018 | Blog
By Penny Smith David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. New York: Vintage, 2017. David Grann is a staff writer for the New Yorker as well as the author of several well-received books (The Lost City of Z, The Devil and...
by jane | May 2, 2018 | Blog
By Penny Smith One of the pleasure of life in Jackson County is the number of parks available for dog walking, an exercise in which I routinely engage. For example, there’s the walkway at the Cullowhee Recreation Center, the Village Green in Cashiers, part of the...
by jane | May 2, 2018 | Blog
By Penny Smith One of my book clubs read Brian Morton’s Florence Gordon last month. Its protagonist is a feisty, indeed cranky, elder feminist, who takes few prisoners. When a man tries to jump the line in a local drug store, she immediately admonishes him. To his...
by jane | May 2, 2018 | Blog
By Penny Smith Edward Bernays, Propaganda. New York, 1928. Yep, that’s right, this is a book originally published in 1928, but it continues to be in print, because the message is so prescient. I had heard about it, read summaries, but hadn’t read the whole thing until...
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