Justin Katz
As I said, leaving Rhode Island is certainly an option, but it’s one that comes with costs that I’m not sure I can manage. I’ve also been inclined to stick it out and fight adversity. As do many Rhode Islanders, I’ve got a bit of thinking to do. As a pretty basic assumption, the place…
This week, I lost over a third of my income owing to a corporate layoff. I can’t blame the Massachusetts research company for which I’ve worked for nearly a decade, because it is just trying to do what it deems necessary to survive, and to be honest, I welcome the opportunity to reshuffle the deck.…
Walter E. Hussman Jr., publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, wants his fellow newspaperati to stop caving to the urge to give away news content for free: News has become ubiquitous, free, and as a result, a commodity. Anytime you are trying to sell something that becomes a commodity, you have lost much of the value…
This letter to the Projo, which links to righttax.org, makes a point worth hearing: In Rhode Island public schools are funded by a combination of state-supplied money and funding generated by cities and towns via property taxes. Unfortunately, in Rhode Island we rely too heavily on the property tax to fund our schools. The second…
The Providence Journal’s recent editorial on technology and the cultural slide has an outdated ring to it: Computers are “extending” our intelligence through a panoply of electronic devices. But whether we are creating anything of more value is debatable. We spend more and more of our lives hitting computer keys but not more time thinking,…
Perhaps this is an annual reality that I’ve just been slow to notice, but my parish priest phrased the traditional blessing of mothers during the closing of today’s Mass as a general blessing for women. He alluded to the pain and regrets that some childless women might feel at having never had the ability or…
Somebody asked me, the other night, what I would do about the housing affordability problem, and to be honest, I didn’t have much of an answer. I guess I’m not at the point, yet, of having comprehensive understanding of or prescriptions for every important issue, and housing is still one of those for which I’ve…
I’m not sure what its significance is, but a Warwick Daily Times story, by Matt Bower, on the Yorke/Avedisian kerfuffle places the story largely in the context of blogs and their commenters: Matt Jerzyk, administrator of the generally liberal RIFuture blog, www.rifuture.org, said he wrote a post the next day expressing his outrage that the…
Give me a break. I realize that progressives don’t want to lose one of their weapons for public assassination, but must we continue pretending that anybody on either side of the aisle actually thinks being gay, of itself, is political poison — especially in Rhode Island? (Not so ironically, one suspects that those politicians who…
With the release of Cape Wind, a book co-authored by the Projo’s Robert Whitcomb, about rich and influential people, ostensibly with socially appropriate environmental consciousnesses, and their fight to kill an environmentally friendly energy project involving water-based windmills, the example on the grounds of the Portsmouth Abbey that I pass twice a day caught my…
