Uneasy Rhetoric

It’s a knee-jerk reaction. In any group of left-leaners, say the word “gentrification” and you’ll think the devil had just walked into the room.
There is a good reason for this reaction, of course. Gentrification, the process by which a run-down neighborhood suddenly sprouts latte joints and art galleries, is a particular kind of [...]

Daniel Weintraub’s column in today’s Bee suggests that California should look to Oregon for its pension solutions. Weintraub jumps the gun, however. He fails to mention that Oregon’s legislation is still in the courts.
Like California, Oregon has a pension problem. State worker pensions were always generous — employees hired prior to 1996, [...]

Back in the old days, at college, when I really was studying rhetoric and not politics, I was a writing tutor. This was cool because 1) I had to be nominated to the post by faculty and 2) I got paid slightly above minimum wage to talk about writing with other people.
Unfortunately, I [...]

One of the cool things about getting big into the blogosphere is discovering that there are thousands of people out there, like me, with an organization fetish - people who have stepped over the edge of being hyper organized and into the realm where they spend more time fretting about their “system” than they do [...]

Dear Apple:
As soon as you announced the iPod shuffle, I knew I had to have one. I also noticed I would have to update to iTunes Version 4.7.1. Since it would be a few weeks before I would be able to buy one, I decided to go ahead and upgrade my iTunes software.
Big [...]