politics – Kenneth

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Water Shortages: A Problem We Can and Must Solve Now

By Kenneth Pike | 5 November 20232 July 2025 by Kenneth Pike

This essay was originally published in Areo Magazine, which has since closed its doors. In 1964, US President Lyndon B. Johnson made a historic request: he wanted a large-scale, nuclear-powered desalination programme to address the growing need for potable water in the American Southwest. Members of the federal government were dispatched to Israel for conversations with the world’s leading experts on desalination technology. Four years later, the Secretary of the Interior and the Chairman of…

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Twenty Years After 9/11, Make America Brave Again

By Kenneth Pike | 11 September 20211 July 2025 by Kenneth Pike

On the morning of September 11th, 2001, footage of the second plane struck me as palpably as a punch to the gut. In those early hours, the unknowable death toll played second fiddle to the more immediate question of whether the attacks would stop. Was this another Pearl Harbor? The start of World War III? I was a long way from New York, but as a twenty-something engaged to be married that fall, I spent…

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Forwards from Grandma

By Kenneth Pike | 21 April 20201 July 2025 by Kenneth Pike

It is improbable that my grandmother was the first woman over 50 to forward every joke, comic, rumor, chain letter, and political screed that hit her email inbox to literally everyone in her address book–but there can be no question that she was among the first. As someone who made much of her living by typing, Grandma was an early adopter of computer technology, and I first accessed a computer network (Prodigy, a pioneer in…