The Outstater: Democracy by the Distant and Detached
(For the use of the membersip only.) SO, AFTER 12 YEARS of Republican leadership, four of them with a super majority, now with a place on the GOP presidential ticket, what could be wrong? At the top of my list is the absence of serious education reform, the kind detailed in the current issue of The Read the full article…
Indiana at 200 (84): Ernie Pyle
by Andrea Neal “Life is completely changed for thousands of American boys on this side of the earth. For at last they are in there fighting.” Hoosier war correspondent Ernie Pyle wrote those words on Dec 1, 1942, while on assignment with U.S. forces in Algiers. The United States had entered World War II in Read the full article…
Backgrounder: The School Lunch Program
by Adrienne Carrier Most of us have halcyon memories of the school-lunch line — the cafeteria ladies, the half-pint milk cartons, always making sure to bring money on pizza day. Nostalgia, though, may mask what the lunch line now represents, that is, an overreaching federal program measuring success by the number of dependent families. We Read the full article…
Half Past the Month: Government Theatre
by Craig Ladwig To be sure, government as entertainment is an acquired taste. But if you can imagine a ballet with the dancers drafted from a personal-injury law firm and the Amalgamated Plumbers Union you can appreciate it. For the connoisseur, there is the planning and zoning meeting. David Mamet, the playwright, famously described this Read the full article…
Backgrounder: Don’t Cry for the Iceman
by Norman Van Cott, Ph.D. One of my earliest memories is the iceman delivering large blocks of ice to my parents’ small triplex apartment in southern California. The ice was deposited in our “ice box” and kept food cool. Frozen? Nope; just cool. Of course, the ice didn’t last forever. It melted and drained into Read the full article…
From the South Wall: Ben-Hur Rides Again
by Andrea Neal In 1959, a best-selling book by Hoosier Lew Wallace became a blockbuster movie, sealing Charlton Heston’s reputation as Hollywood’s leading man and winning a record 11 Academy Awards. Paramount Pictures hopes to repeat the phenomenon in 2016 with Timur Bekmambetov’s adaptation of Ben-Hur starring Jack Huston and Morgan Freeman. It opens in Read the full article…
