My fellow booksellers in these parts were recently advised to research and stock books created under the auspices of the FDR-era “Federal Writers’ Project,” a tax-and-spend-and-elect outfit created in 1935 as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration. That’s good advice as far as it goes. Writers who later became well-known, from Nelson Algren […]
Friends and fans — if few in number then all the more cherished — have been asking why I seem to have been writing less this year. I hope I don’t take too much on myself if I’m reminded of Paul McCartney reporting the press reaction when the Beatles stopped touring and went almost a […]
Attempts to contact Vin at his former work email address or phone number may appear to go unanswered. Ditto, possibly, with snail mail … we haven’t checked. But it does seem that emails sent to him are going into a black hole somewhere — and the answering machine will take a message though he’ll never […]
A regular reader writes in to protest my assertion that America now has enough proven fossil fuel reserves to last for centuries, warning “Fracking technology isn’t sustainable.” As with other shorthand terms designed to eliminate case-by-case by analysis, when “unsustainable” comes to mean merely “bad,” the results can get silly.
From the mailbag Another Fearless Drug Warrior is writing my boss at the daily Review-Journal, trying to get me fired. One “Scott Miller” wrote in on March 12:
A reader — one of many similar — recently wrote in to complain “They tell us that Social Security and Medicare are broken. The fact is the government used that money for wars and should have left the money in the so-called lock box. … I’m incensed that those programs are called entitlements. I paid […]
Vin’s note – I received this from Dr. Russell L. Blaylock, a retired neurosurgeon and author. He generously granted permission for me to post his answer here. Dr. Blaylock is a former clinical assistant professor of neurosurgery at the University of Mississippi Medical Center and is currently a visiting professor in the biology department at […]
On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 1:11 PM, Cxxxxxx Cxxxx wrote (reproduced below without edit, remarkably): Dear Mr. Suprynowicz,
In response to my recent columns on the Nevada DMV urging (or even requiring) that 83-year-old widows who prefer to retain their late husbands’ surnames “get their names changed” to match those on Social Security cards likely issued when they were 16 years old, I received numerous smug and sanctimonious assertions that “Driving is not […]
In my Jan. 9 column — “I like to pay taxes; with them I buy civilization” — I wrote: “What’s that? What about those unemployed through no fault of their own? Get rid of all the government interventions in the labor market, including payroll taxes, and jobs would sprout like fungi. Of course, they might […]