Current national and global events.
State of This Union — President’s Message August and the University of Arkansas 2026-2027 term has begun. How did you spend your summer? I spent bits of mine wondering why I never got more excited about the nation’s 250th Independence Day compared to, say, last year’s 249th. It doesn’t seem to be just me. In […]
An Editor’s Note For all my love of words, I’m lousy at protest signs. Six maybe eight words is perfect. Pickets are a lot like billboards. You’re driving by, so highway ads need to be sparse for comprehension. That’s the same with demonstrations, where picketers stand on a sidewalk as cars whiz by. The No […]
For a year, most Ivy League schools plus a few public universities like Virginia have been pressured directly by the Trump administration. For the University of Arkansas, Trump’s impact has been serious but less direct – mainly threats of federal budget cuts to research, scholarship and other grants, and also re-imagining civil rights legislation to […]
Top Ten Reasons the University of Arkansas Doesn’t Need to Find Places on Campus to Nail 500 Copies of One Translation of the Ten Commandments Editor’s Note by Ben Pollock, Local 965 vice president News item: “U of A Rolls Out Ten Commandments Displays,” Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Oct. 16, 2025, also reported by various local, […]
An Editor’s Note I don’t know when I began being paranoid about job security. I’d like to think it was working for newspaper editor John R. Starr from 1985 to his retirement in 1992, because if you just read his caustic columns, who could blame me. It’s likely to be my nature, from childhood. After […]
An Editor’s Note It’s incredible that no wag by now has given our era a name that sticks, goes viral. The announcements and actions coming out of Washington this year — with no sign of slowing — qualify for uniqueness. We came close in 2017-2021 to a singular name, but no go. Maybe that’s because […]