Social Commentary

Plain Speak: When Simplicity Speaks Louder than Legalese

The other day I signed a third-party agreement to back up to the cloud our document repository. Functionality: kind of ho-hum, routine, and back-end. Cost: about $200 per year. However, the agreement took weeks to negotiate and ended up being over 30 pages of gobbledygook legalese, replete with WHEREASes and disclaimers and tangled prose. By

The Peace Bell Warrior Story

How Chiyoji Nakagawa Became a Soldier for Peace and Changed the World This is a transcript of a story told by Nakagawa’s daughter, Seiko Takase (Representative Director, Association for the Preservation of the UN Peace Bell), on a Zoom call held on behalf of the Earth Society Foundation, of which OBS President Laura Fillmore is

Publishing Peace: U.S. Can Lead by Example

As nations supporting Ukrainian resistance hurry to deliver military weaponry to the front, and as volunteer soldiers join the fray from around the world, promising to defend democracy by fighting fire with fire, the nuclear nations of the world — specifically the U.S. — have an unprecedented opportunity to practice peace, to try and change

May Day During COVID-19: A Time of Fear or Joy?

May Day! It’s May Day! We have three options to celebrate this day: a joyful, youthful celebration and dance; a protest of the masses against the elite; or a desperate cry for help. This pandemic year, it looks like all three types of May Day celebration were in order for the publishing industry. Remember the

A Vanishing World Made Permanent through Publishing

Anne C. Wyman, once the Boston Globe’s first full-time travel writer and long-time editorial page editor, in 2010 asked OBS’s Protean Press to publish her book “Kiping’s Cat: A Memoir of my Father.” Over the years, this publishing project grew into four Wyman books, two of them posthumous publications by Anne’s father himself, Jeffries Wyman.