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 […]
An Awkward Salute to Black History Month My late Uncle George was a funny guy. That’s how he thought of himself and how his friends and community saw him, too. He was quick with a quip, usually smutty. He kept these jokes out of my earshot until I reached high school. I was crazy about […]
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 […]
Holidays and Holy Days I’d like to thank the governor, the honorable Sarah Huckabee Sanders, for giving my colleagues in Arkansas state government and me Friday off, well, outside of first-responders and the like. Holiday? Actually, that was Thursday, Christmas, making this 26th of December similar to the day after Thanksgiving. That’s Black Friday, not […]
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 […]