Staring into The Newsroom’s Funhouse Mirror

by Tim McMahan

The Newsroom is a new drama series about the cable news wars that airs Sunday nights on HBO. It's penned by Aaron Sorkin -- the guy behind The West Wing (a successful show on NBC, which I rarely watched) who also wrote films such as The Social Network and Moneyball. Sorkin is known for his talky dialogue, which can resemble either free-form poetry or random babbling.

The show premiered three...

Obamacare in Nebraska

by Sean McGuire

It is hard to quantify what the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the largest piece of legislation passed in our lifetime is going to mean for Nebraska and Omaha.  There are innumerable variables to consider, and questions will remain years from now.  The Affordable Care Act (ACA), commonly called Obamacare, will have an impact on all of us, so here are a few things to watch closely.

The law...

White Whine on the 4th of July

by Tim McMahan

I used to drive a Porsche.

Not one of the expensive fancy ones, just a little used Boxster that probably cost less than your brand new Ford. I hadn’t sought out the Porsche, it just sort of came to me. I had been in the market for a new used car, an Audi TT to be exact. A friend of my dad was headed to an auto action in Milwaukee, and I’d asked him to call if one came up on the bidding line,...

Equality Now

by Sean McCarthy

On Tuesday, March 13, Equal Omaha and dozens of people packed the Legislative Chambers to hear the City Council's decision on an equal employment ordinance proposed by District 2 representative Ben Gray. The ordinance would prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

In the three months leading up to the vote, city leaders, business owners, members of the local...

Control Your Rainwater

by Amanda Hayward

A Windstar tour bus sat at the Douglas/Sarpy County Extension Office waiting for the 55 people attending the 2012 Omaha Green Infrastructure Tour. It was going to be a long day.

As the city moves forward with a $2 billion Clean Solutions Omaha (CSO) plan to comply with environmental regulations and reduce sewage overflows from 52 times per year to four, controlling stormwater is estimated to...

Dave Phipps takes show to the voters

by Kietryn Zychal

Gender equity in sports has come a long way, baby

by Leo Adam Biga

Participants in girls and women's sports today should be forgiven if they take for granted the bounty of athletic scholarships, competitive opportunities, training facilities and playing venues afforded them.

After all, they've never known anything else.

Their predecessors from two generations ago or more, however, faced a much leaner landscape. One where athletic scholarships were unheard...

A Fashionable War

by Tim McMahan

The new Mynabirds album, Generals, is slowly growing on me, despite initially being turned off by singer/songwriter Laura Burhenn’s quasi-political message and the accompanied “New Revolutionists” pseudo-feminist marketing effort, which seems to equate fashion with protest.

Whether it’s basic issues of reproduction (or as I like to call it, “a woman’s right over her own body”) or the simple...