In the 1980s, while we were training freelancers to negotiate using the National Writers Union’s model magazine contract, my comrade, the Vermont journalist David Goodman, mentioned that he had a standard reply when editors named a fee: “That sounds a little low to me.” It mattered little what fee the editor suggested; the ploy worked. That’s probably because David was usually telling the truth, and his editors knew it. Some welcomed the chance to wrench a few more bucks out of the boss.... Read more

Got work?

To mingle with folks who don’t, I stopped by a peanut-butter-and-jelly “breadline” in New York’s Union Square the other evening. The event was organized by the Retail Action Project, a joint effort of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union and the venerable community group Good Old Lower East Side. RAP’s goal is not just to better conditions and organize workers but to build alliances between the employed and the jobless, the laborer and the artist, the clerk and the customer.... Read more

Only days after the presidential election, I began receiving emails from the Democratic National Committee’s Organizing for America — formerly Obama for America. Several times a week, they implored me to show my support for this or that presidential initiative, and to send money. Such an email arrived a half hour after the president delivered his health care speech last week. “Judith,” it began. “I just finished laying out my plan for health reform at a joint session of Congress.... Read more

Vermont may be having a cooler-than-usual summer, but everywhere else America’s temperature is rising.

In Las Vegas and Washington, teenagers are beating up homeless people for the thrill of it.

On the greens, golfers are swinging their clubs at perpetrators of “slow play.”

G.I. Joe, featuring nonstop futuristic military mayhem, was last weekend’s biggest-grossing movie.

And at town hall meetings across the nation, opponents of health care reform are shouting and shoving and burning their representatives in effigy.... Read more

Obama had it wrong. Sonia Sotomayor is not empathetic. She doesn’t care about how people in the real world live and feel. She’s not a Latina judge, wise or otherwise. She’s a computer sorting ones and zeros: The law says so, the law says not; precedent upholds, precedent overturns.... Read more

In the health-care debate, there are two kinds of people: those who are sick and those who will be sick. The problem is, most Americans, especially young ones, refuse to acknowledge their membership in the second category. Our so-called health-care “system” promotes and exploits this peculiar American illusion: that the body is invulnerable and the spirit autonomous; that human need is a temporary aberration.... Read more

It is tempting to view the Saga of Bristol and Levi as political: the sacrifice of two young lives to the vice-presidential, now presidential, ambitions of a mother. During the campaign, the response to Bristol’s pregnancy was one of the McCain-Palin spin machine’s only successful maneuvers, from the pre-emptive announcement to the image makeover of the “fuckin’ redneck” father to the couple’s coming-out at the Republican Convention as smiling fiancés.

When McCain lost, I thought: Lucky kids, now they don’t have to get married.... Read more

I’ve been peeved all month about the latest panic: “sexting.” More and more states are bringing child-porn charges against teenagers who take racy pictures of themselves and send them electronically to lovers or pals. Child pornography is a far more serious crime — in terms of penalties, anyway — than is having actual sex. Sentences run to years per image, and after prison the person must register as a sex offender, a kind of life sentence in itself.... Read more

Yes, the economic crisis has hit us all hard. But tough times also bring out the old-fashioned value of thrift and inspire the ingenuity and grit to practice it. Here are 10 tips for making it through the downturn. Don’t confine yourself to my suggestions, though. Be creative — and generous: Share these ideas with family and friends!... Read more

“Irresponsible,” spat President Obama of the banking executives awarding themselves humongous bonuses just after the Treasury FedExed a trillion dollars to Wall Street. “Shameful.”

When did we stop adulating the wealthy? Was it when Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain chose the moment his company received its $20 billion handout to dial his decorator and discuss that $1.22-million office renovation? Was it the $35,115 toilet, the $1405 trash can? The total of those executive bonuses, $18 billion?... Read more