Author: Noria Doyle

Americans were fluent in public cruelty long before the decade of Donald Trump, but he changed the nature of how that cruelty took shape. Now, when a child is torn away from a parent at the border, the reaction is not always horror. A family loses housing, and the response can be suspicion. A sick neighbor asks for caution during a public health crisis, and the answer may be defiance. The result can look like a country full of people without empathy, and in everyday moral language, it becomes easy to call such behavior psychopathic. But that label can...

Across the Western world, politics has stopped being about ideas and has become about enemies. The rightward drift that has swept the United States, much of Europe, and parts of Asia in the past decade is not an ideological revival. It is the hollowing out of democracy itself, a movement defined less by conviction than by contempt. Fear has become the organizing principle of power, and grievance has replaced governance as the chief currency of politics. The Republican Party in the United States illustrates the transformation most vividly. Once claiming to defend free markets and small government, it now...

Motion pictures remains one of the last widely shared cultural reference points in an increasingly fragmented media environment. This series, Cinema as allegory: Using film to understand power, inequality, and civic life in Milwaukee, uses well-known films not as entertainment reviews, but as allegorical frameworks for examining contemporary political, economic, and social conditions. The articles connect themes such as political control, identity, propaganda, surveillance, nostalgia, privatization, segregation, and institutional failure to ongoing realities shaping Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the United States. Each is intended as an explanatory analysis grounded in history, civic structures, and public policy rather than literal comparisons...

Through immigration, trade, popular culture, and decades of exposure to Lunar New Year traditions, most Americans now understand that the East Asian zodiac begins and ends with a familiar set of 12 animals. A year may be associated with the Dragon, Horse, Tiger, or Rabbit, and the cycle repeats every dozen years. Yet behind that well-known zodiac lies a more complex calendar system that has shaped the way generations in China, Korea, Japan, and other parts of East Asia understood the passage of time. The year 2026 offers a rare opportunity to see that larger system at work. In...

For decades, anime occupied a strange place in American entertainment culture. It was visible enough to attract loyal audiences, yet distant enough to remain outside the mainstream. In cities like Milwaukee during the 1980s and 1990s, discovering Japanese animation often required deliberate effort through imported VHS tapes, comic shops, specialty retailers, fan clubs, and late-night cable programming. Watching anime was less passive entertainment than participation in a subculture built around scarcity. That dynamic changed dramatically by the late 1990s and early 2000s as titles like Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon reached larger American audiences through syndicated television and...