In 1989 as I was covering the ill-fated occupation of Beijing’s sprawling Tiananmen Square by pro-democracy demonstrators, I bought a book entitled: “Thick Black Theory.” Of all the books I have read about China and the Chinese mind, this book by a Chinese scholar and politician named Li Zhongwu was …
The latest buzzword among urban planners is the “15-minute city”—a utopian “green” vision designed to persuade us to live in small, dense urban condos without our cars. The 15-minute city is a concept developed by a professor at the Sorbonne in Paris. Leave it to an academic to come up …
I am finding it increasingly difficult to be optimistic about America today. We have abandoned scientific fact, morality, and patriotism in pursuit of pseudo-science, impiety, and ambiguously deceitful concepts such as “equity,” “gender dysphoria,” and the increasingly violent cult of Transgenderism. Schools can no longer define what a woman is …
Today, I am turning my blog over to Mike Ford, founder and managing editor of the American Free News Network https://afnn.us/ to which I am a contributor. Mike is also a former U.S. Army Colonel and US Military Academy graduate (class of 1980). In his post, he raises several legitimate …
Our country is so woke that we now need a new award to honor people who stand up to the PC mob and the corrosive cancel-culture lunacy they have spawned. The unlikely creator of the “Cojones Awards” is normally liberal Bill Maher, the “Real Time” host who appears to be …
Last week, in case you missed it, was “Ethics in Journalism Week,” sponsored by the Society of Professional Journalists. As a journalist and a member of the SPJ myself, I naturally visited the SPJ’s website to see how it was commemorating this occasion. As expected, the site was bursting with …
Tomorrow, April 29, I will be posting my recollections of the Fall of Saigon- an event I covered for the Chicago Tribune 48 years ago. I invite you to join me for this retrospective at ForeignCorrespondent or on Substack: https://ronyates.substack.com/. As many of you may know, the war in Vietnam …
For those of us who toil in the media verse, nothing grabs our attention quicker than when powerful political appointees and grossly over-paid cable news hosts and anchors get canned or depart their lucrative positions. Yesterday was genuinely a day of days–a Monday morning media massacre! First came the news …
As I always acknowledge when I post about Chicago, I am not a native Chicagoan. However, I spent 27 years with the Chicago Tribune, where I held a variety of positions, from reporter and editor to foreign correspondent and member of the editorial board. So, even though I am not …
Nothing is more meaningful for authors than receiving good reviews. Positive reviews provide validation of sorts for their work, and negative reviews can provide valuable evaluation, especially if it is constructive. Amazon is overflowing with book reviews—but not all of them are thoughtful, and few actually examine a book with …