Featured Stories

The Misfits’ Club

Back in the late 1990s, when I was teaching in Brooklyn, NY, I had a student named Uran Dragon Kolenovic. And, it seemed that the dragon lived inside Uran’s head.

Uran Kolenovic was a 14-year-old immigrant from Kosovo whose mother and father had sent him to America to live with his grandmother when he… full story HERE »

Small businesses are the backbone of our economy and the engine of job creation. – Ronald Reagan

I never met a small businessman yet who didn’t have one finger up his ass and the other on the scales. - Mad Dog Howard

Like many older married men, I’d rather… full story HERE »

The farmers said they left the building feeling dejected. Their application for a coffee export license had been denied by Anacafé a third time. The process started about six months before when Jorge, not a coffee farmer himself but a resourceful man who had offered to help, went to the Anacafé office to learn what… full story HERE »

When Glamis Gold began constructing its $254 million open-pit gold and silver mine in Guatemala’s Western Highlands in 2004, the company promised residents in the Department of San Marcos jobs, schools and other social projects, in exchange for letting it extract precious metals. But a few years later, Elida Lopez Tojil, a lifelong resident of… full story HERE »

… full story HERE »

When Venezuelans amassed in the streets of Caracas and loyal military units faced down rogue superiors in April of 2002, they may have symbolically ended more than just the coup d’etat against their republic’s constitutional government. Though conflated by Western media as an internal conflict spurred by the precipitous, firebrand ways of president Hugo Chávez,… full story HERE »

A short time ago Barack Obama, aspiring Democratic candidate for the Presidency of the United States of America, ran into some problems with the nuts on the “Fair and Balanced” right wing of American cable news. It seems that the preacher at Obama’s house of worship, Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, has… full story HERE »

I am reaching into my pocket to pay the ladies at the chai shop when the shouting begins. “The sea is coming! The sea is coming!” People are running past, down the path from the beach towards the Ashram. The sea is coming? What the fuck does that mean? I… full story HERE »

I first met my daughter in the lobby of the Westin Camino Real, the grandest hotel in Guatemala City. The night before, my husband Walter and I had soothed our nerves running on the treadmills in the fitness center, where a polite attendant handed us plush white towels and spritzed the equipment with a flowery… full story HERE »

After 30 odd, very odd I might add, years of drinking tequila and mezcal I have managed to emerge relatively unscathed. Yes, there was the night in New York back in 1979 that led to the morning where I awoke in the apartment and bed of a “female” Scottish weightlifter. We met in a bar… full story HERE »