Dear Friend and Reader: This week, timed with the solstice and Mars entering Cancer, we are launching a membership and fundraising drive for Planet Waves. All of our work here is sponsored exclusively by you, our readers. For many reasons we remain free from corporate sponsorship and outside advertising. We create the work that we … Read more
Dear Friend and Reader: As the northern solstice approaches and the Sun comes to an apparent halt along the horizon, the planets are making many moves. Among them is Mercury in Gemini pushing into a 90-degree meeting (a square) with Neptune in Pisces, exact Tuesday. This is part of the current retrograde cycle that is … Read more
Dear Friend and Reader: On my short to-do list of book projects, I have a concept for one called Know When You Don’t Know: A Guide to Investigative Reporting and Life. The little joke in there is that life is kind of like an investigative reporting project. It always was one, but in our current environment … Read more
Dear Friend and Reader: Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor now living in exile in Moscow, has done something that few people have done: he made the American government and much of American society let out a little squeak. Compared to the roar of the national security state, it was a modest sound. Yet it has … Read more
Dear Friend and Reader: Back in January 2003, during a Sun-Mercury conjunction, George Ryan, the outgoing governor of Illinois, commuted the death sentences of 167 people, clearing out death row. Illinois had an infamous reputation: by that day, 17 convicted murderers, all of them sentenced to death and having exhausted their appeals, had been exonerated of … Read more