Gongol.com Archives: June 2021
June 20, 2021
A storm is to blame, but it's fun to blame the new lights in the Quaker Oats sign instead
When mental wellness is relegated to the back seat
A compelling obituary tells the story of an Iowan who had a lot going for him -- and who did a lot of good in life -- but whose addiction to methamphetamine killed him. And the root cause of his troubles, it seems, is that he needed more and better care for his mental wellness than the system around him was able to provide.
China uses "law" to shut down Hong Kong's freedom of the Internet
The Great Firewall is being expanded to isolate even more territory
That's the equivalent printed length of the complete works of Mike Royko at the Chicago Tribune. (And the Tribune was his third newspaper in Chicago.) Compiling his years of daily columns into a single work gives an exceptional illustration of just how many words one person can write. Not all of the columns are great, but many are still readable decades after his death, and it wasn't for nothing that he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in the early phase of his career as a columnist. The sheer expansiveness of Royko's work is something to behold.
