I’m a native of the greater Milwaukee area, infamous for being one of the most segregated areas in the country. According to a January 8, 2019 Brookings Institute study, “three out of four black residents in Chicago, Milwaukee, or New York would have to move in order to live in fully integrated neighborhoods with whites.” …
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Category:Culture
Family Reunion
Artwork by Michael DiMilo After the Thanksgiving holiday, during our gastric recuperation period, my family and I sat down and watched Martin Scorsese’s new film, The Irishman, in its entirety. To say the film is epic is to abuse the term understatement; not only is the film’s running time three and one-half hours, but the storyline …
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Hands I Cannot See
Artwork by Michael DiMilo This last Saturday, I installed myself at a table at the Authors Market at the Southeast Wisconsin Book Festival to hawk copies of my novel, The P.S. Wars: Last Stand at Custer High. A lot of people stopped and engaged me in some very interesting conversations. We talked about everything from self-publishing, …
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Cool Beans
Kudos for Michael DiMilo Congratulations to Michael DiMilo for his award-winning short animated film Cool Beans. We are incredibly lucky to have Michael provide many of the outstanding illustrations for this blog and now you can see his outstanding animated work, too. If you haven’t yet seen it, check out coming attractions for this delightful …
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Whistling In the Graveyard
Photos by Geoff Carter By Geoff Carter While driving around running errands this last Sunday, my wife and I found ourselves in the somewhat unusual position of having some time to kill, a strange situation for us. It was a beautiful October afternoon, sunny and seasonably mild. The leaves were nearly at their peak and …
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Devolution
Artwork by Michael DiMilo This past weekend, my brother and took a trip to the family cabin in order to take in the pier, an autumn ritual. It’s a long ride to get up there, just under a four-hour trek, but the fall colors were just reaching their peak, so it was very scenic, although …
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The Big Burnout
Artwork by Michael DiMilo By Geoff Carter After Donald Trump was elected—and even before then (during the non-stop drama of his reality-TV campaign and election)—I was an avid consumer of political news. On cable TV, I followed Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes, Anderson Cooper, Bill Maher, Joe Scarborough with Mika Brzezinski, and even, for as long …
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The Big If…
Artwork By Michael DiMilo Last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the House of Representatives would be commencing an impeachment inquiry against President Trump based on whistleblower evidence alleging the president had pressured Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate his political opponent, Joe Biden. After speaking to the urgency of the situation and the …
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Immoral Support
Artwork by Michael DiMilo In a story that recently went viral, an ad agency employee was summoned to a meeting with his human resources supervisor, presumably to be terminated, and was told that he would be able to have a “support” person accompany him to the interview. The employee elected to bring a clown as …
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The Sounds of Silence
Art By Michael DiMilo A couple of weeks ago, during one of our late summer hot spells, my wife and I were sitting on our front porch sipping a fine chilled French rose. We live on a relatively busy city street, but even with the traffic and other ambient noise, we were still able to …
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