Twin Cities Daily Planet (https://www.tcdailyplanet.net/author/rich-broderick/page/4/)
Over the past few weeks as Michele Bachmann’s star has risen in the firmament of GOP presidential hopefuls, I have been reading a flurry of emails, blogs, and Facebook status updates from fellow Minnesotans of a leftish bent decrying Bachmann not only for her extremist ideology but for being “insane” or “crazy.” Last week she was even treated to Continue Reading
A few days ago, I made a trip to Wat Po, a huge complex of Buddhist temples, stupas and learning halls attached to the Royal Palace in the center of Bangkok. I was there not to gain enlightenment, however, but a Thai massage. In the end, I got some of both.
She was a young farang — or Westerner — and I could see that she was failing to make herself understood by the security guard at Bangkok’s Thammasat University where I am newly installed as a research fellow. Continue Reading
In his masterpiece, Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti proposed that one of our primal fears is of unwanted contact with strangers. Out in public places, he observed, to be touch, jostled, even brushed against, can trigger something akin to panic.
Even before the sudden passing of The World’s Most Wanted Man, I was struck by how many parallels there are between the life and crimes, the individual and cultural pathologies, of George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden.
April 2011 marked the anniversary of the two most seminal events in American history.
Naturally enough, both involve violence.
After the Great Crash of 1929, Andrew Mellon, one of the wealthiest men in America as well as Secretary of the Treasury, gave President Hoover a bit of advice right out of the playbook of laissez-faire capitalism.
Liquidate, liquidate, liquidate.
In the midst of this seemingly endless winter, it’s hard to imagine a better tonic for the sensory deprivation of cabin fever than the exhibition by members of the Outdoor Painters of Minnesota ope
Imagine the sound our collective yearning
for the return of the light must make:
all that whistling past the graveyard
in the darkest hours of the night, hours
which, at this time of year, seem like
they will never end, though that
has never happened, at least not yet,
the sun remaining true to the blind law Continue Reading
This past weekend, at the height of the blizzard that descended on the Twin Cities, my son and I got out our cross-country skis and went on an expedition.