Steven Mikulan

1 week ago | capitalandmain.com | Steven Mikulan

Since Donald Trump’s return to the White House, every week has come with some “high noon” reckoning — a lonely, do or die moment when Americans face a choice between fight or flight. Suddenly and unfairly, history shines a spotlight on us, and all the reassuring civics lessons we learned in school fly out the window.

2 weeks ago | laprogressive.com | Steven Mikulan |Rob Maurer

One day years ago I joined a long line in Moscow to buy cigarettes. The idea of having to wait for a pack of lowly White Sea Canals seemed a bit absurd but, I figured, people at this state-run tabak kiosk were probably used to queueing for everything. (Russia was still the USSR back then.) As soon as the vendor opened his window for business a shouting match erupted between him and the head of the line.

2 weeks ago | capitalandmain.com | Steven Mikulan

We love heroes, especially those who rise to the occasion against a consensus of appeasement. These rebellious, disobedient individuals, who risk both lives and livings, are celebrated in pop culture from Gary Cooper’s beleaguered marshal in High Noon to Bruce Willis’ Everyman in Die Hard. In real life, however, such people are rare. Since Jan.

Jul 28, 2024 | laweekly.com | Steven Mikulan

John Dos Passos opened his U.S.A. trilogy of novels with a freewheeling inventory of what made up the United States (“a publiclibrary full of old newspapers and dogeared historybooks with protests scrawled on the margins, a lot of men buried in their uniforms in Arlington Cemetery”) and what it meant to be an American during the early 20th century.

Jul 28, 2024 | laweekly.com | Steven Mikulan

It was a little like The Twilight Zone,” says director Barry Levinson about Bill Clinton's latest sexual red alert. “I came into the kitchen to read the paper, and there's a scandal about a young girl and the White House in it, and the possibility of war with Iraq.