For thirty years the rate of incarceration in the United States has risen inversely to the rate of crime, a fact that has been hardest on black, working-class citizens.

Add to O’Rourke’s thesis that engagement rings symbolize a lot of attitudes that women don’t really want to be associated with anymore the fact that diamonds are symbols of exploitative labor practices that range from murderous to shameful, and the whole engagement scene suddenly reveals itself to have been reeking for a long, long time.

My first thought when I came home tonight was to clean the apartment. Is that wrong?

When we first moved into this apartment, there was a noticeable crack in the ceiling in the bedroom, but we didn’t think much of it. However, the crack in our ceiling turned out to be more of a problem than it seemed.

Years ago, when we lived in an apartment with ceilings low enough to make us both feel tall, we learned something important about cable television in Iowa City: Pay for Basic, get Family.

That globalization is a fact of modern life can be astonishing, and it can be promising, and it can be worrying, and it can be depressing. It is often all of these adjectives all at once because globalization is simply a euphemism for pollution.