Alfred the Wonder Dog

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March 27, 2006 / Shaun Richman

I Want Candy

When I was younger, my favorite treat at the candy shops in the malls was the red licorice shoelace. I’d tie them into knots and gobble them up before I’d make it to the parking lot. I have been craving
February 17, 2005 / Shaun Richman

Shit In, Shit Out

Harvard President Lawrence Summers is sunk. He’s catching a lot of hell from his faculty and students over some stupid remarks that he made, by way of explaining Harvard’s gender imbalance in the sciences, that suggested that women aren’t as
June 12, 2005 / Shaun Richman

What Campaign Finance Reform?

I received a constituent mailing from my City Council representative Melinda Katz, or, rather, from “Speaker Gifford Miller and Council Member Melinda Katz…Working to Make Our City Cleaner and Safer.” Voters have long been accustomed to incumbents using taxpayer-financed constituent
March 14, 2005 / Shaun Richman

Dan Hennessey Has Died

I was at a Save the Plaza rally when I heard the grim news that one of my former co-workers, Dan Hennessey, had died on Sunday morning. He was hit by a car near his home in Woodside. Apparently it
August 21, 2005 / Shaun Richman

The Column That Never Was

The column that I was hired to write for a certain Queens weekly has been canceled before the first piece was even published. That piece, a critical look at the fall-out from Congressman Greg Meeks’ support for CAFTA, did not

September 28, 2023 / me

VIDEO: On Rick Smith Show Discussing Strikes, Biden, Obama
September 12, 2023 / me

Searching for Ludwig Lore

I’m back in FOIA hell. Some time in the last decade, the FBI began methodically transferring the dead case files of dead Communists to the National Archives and Records Administration. This is a disaster for scholarship on American Communism. If
August 1, 2023 / me

“Why should we worry about organizing groups of people who do not want to be organized?”

The AFL and CIO merged in 1955, and union organizing–particularly measured by union win rates in NLRB elections–began a long, slow decline. Although the labor movement in New York City took an additional four years to unite, when they finally
July 31, 2023 / me

Making Sense of the 1950’s Teamsters

The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations merged in 1955, with big talk and high hopes for organizing the remaining non-union strongholds in the nation’s economy. Three years later, they were laying off organizers on staff and
July 27, 2023 / me

The Specificity/Universality of Sinead O’Connor

To the extent that casual music fans (which is to say, most people) know her, it’s as a “one-hit wonder” whose best known song was a cover. It happened to be written by the legendary artist Prince, whose own songwriter