Michael Johns: 7 books

"I went to Nicaragua with nothing but a tourist visa, $1,500 in cash, the name of someone at the Agrarian Reform Ministry, and the idea of being a revolutionary intellectual. . . . The idea took hold in a simple character flaw: wanting to believe that I knew better than everyone else."—From the...

A local rock star once said, “San Francisco is forty-nine square miles surrounded by reality.” No American city has such a broad sweep of staggering views—of the ocean, of a huge bay, of surrounding hills—or such a high opinion of its own worth. San Francisco has always been rich, too; the...

March With the Muse is a collection of poems on various subjects, written in the 31 day month of March 2012 by Michael N. Johns. Perhaps creativity, perhaps a childlike spirit, or perhaps unmedicated attention deficit disorder, inspires friends to occasionally remark, “You’re so random.” In...

Mexico City assumed its current character around the turn of the twentieth century, during the dictatorship of Porfirio Daz (1876-1911). In those years, wealthy Mexicans moved away from the Zcalo, the city's traditional center, to western suburbs where they sought to imitate European and American ways...

The New Minorities of Europe: Social Cohesion in the European Unionargues that while the EU currently faces economic issues, it is pressed with larger questions and potential problems due to the backlash against those who move freely inside the union. It uses the intra-EU migrants, particularly the...

Our health care system is crippled by desperate efforts to prevent the inevitable. A third of the national Medicare budget—nearly 175 billion—is spent on the final year of life, and a third of that amount on the final month, often on expensive (and futile) treatments. Such efforts betray a fundamental...

From President Truman's use of a domestic propaganda agency to Ronald Reagan's handling of the Soviet Union during his 1984 reelection campaign, the American political system has consistently exerted a profound effect on the country's foreign policies. Americans may cling to the belief that "politics...