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Life Lessons

A Clickbait Strike Lifts All of Us

It’s Science: A Rising Tide Would Lift All Boats An Editor’s Note This could be our year. The next months could see unions that support public educators and support staff, indeed the unions for all varieties of workers, return to proportionate prominence. This is because of the Hollywood strikes. All unions due to the walkout […]

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Life Lessons

Transcription Transgressions

While August 2012 still feels like fall before last on remembering my second and final layoff from the newspaper profession, June 2013 seems longer than the six years it maths out when I recall that month’s part-time job, transcriptionist at the University of Arkansas Pryor Center for Oral and Visual History. Those few hours a […]

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Life Lessons

Lunch. Free? Sure.

I have one good story about the recently departed editor Guy Unangst but didn’t know it was a story until a new reporter in around 2004 asked me, “Did you have a fistfight with Guy Unangst in the middle of the newsroom?” “We did? What, us? Nah, there was no –. “Wait a minute. You […]

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Life Lessons

The Indian and the Jew

“The Indian and the Jew.” Kevin loved saying that about us. This is a man I’ve known since we were 6 or 7 years old, meeting and becoming fast friends in first grade at Ballman Elementary in Fort Smith. That’s in the vicinity of five and a half decades. I have not seen Kevin in […]

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Life Lessons

Bad-bad and Bad-good Choices

Insight on waking today: We daily make bad-good decisions and bad-bad decisions. These are common calls, far milder than “Should I drop out of school” or “Should I marry this person.” Binging on chips and dip — make mine vegan if you please — is a bad-good decision. Dwelling on grim news that is more than […]

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Life Lessons

What Do You Want to Be

House outside Fairfield, Iowa, June 2016 Copyright 2016 Ben S. Pollock Jr.