Born in 1930 in Schiller Park, Ill., the deceased was 82 years old at the time of passing, which ironically was the day before Thanksgiving.

Having long enjoyed the sweet life, the end was a bit bitter, for the dearly departed's estate had been mercilessly plundered in recent years by unscrupulous money managers. This left 18,500 surviving family members in dire straits. Indeed, the family contends that the octogenarian's death was not due to natural causes, but to foul play — a case of corporate murder.

This is the drama behind the sudden death of Twinkies. Fondly remembered as "the cream puff of the proletariat" (and less fondly as a sugar-and-fat bomb that delivered a toothache in one bite and a heart attack in the next), this industrial concoction of 37 ingredients became, for better or worse, an icon of American food processing.

The father of the Twinkie was James Dewar, a baker at the old Continental Baking Co. who saw the goo-filled tube cake as a way to keep the factory's confection machinery busy after strawberry shortcake season ended. Yes, the Twinkie was actually conceived as "food" for idle machines. How fitting is that?

But us humans happily swallowed this extruded marvel of comestible engineering. As a teenager, I probably downed my weight in Twinkies each year — and my long years on this Earth might well be due to the heavy dose of preservatives, artificial flavors and other chemicals baked into every one of those cellophane-wrapped two-packs that I consumed.

The Twinkie was the best-seller of Hostess Brands, a conglomerate purveyor of some 30 nutritionally challenged (but moneymaking) brand-name food products, ranging from Wonder Bread to Ho Hos. In the past year, Hostess racked up $2.5 billion in sales — yet it suffered a staggering $1.1 billion in losses. Thus, on Nov. 21, Ripplewood Holdings, the private ...

Here’s a peculiarly American paradox: We are the most affluent country in the history of the world, with an elaborate education system and expansive legal guarantees for free expression.

Yet many citizens are afraid of talking. Outside of the political/media circus in which people disagree theatrically, many people — right, left, and center — avoid thoughtful conversation with those who might disagree.

So, for anyone heading to a Thanksgiving gathering where there will be a variety of people, including some you know you disagree with, a bit of advice: Make sure you talk about religion and politics.

This goes against the conventional wisdom, but there are two good reasons, one selfish and the other moral.

The selfish reason: If we don’t talk about religion or politics, what else is there of interest to discuss? Let’s define “religion” broadly, as wrestling with ultimate questions of existence that are wrapped up in the query, “What does it mean to be a human being?” Let’s understand “politics” broadly, to mean the way we answer, “How should power and resources be distributed?” Those questions make life interesting.

Pushed down the wrong path, these conversations can make some people surly, but they can just as easily open up stimulating, honest exchanges. Here are two suggestions for fostering that engagement.

On religion: People will ask, “Do you believe in God?” Instead of taking that as an invitation to a verbal brawl, I respond, “What do you mean by God?” That invites a thoughtful exchange by asking others to expand on what they believe.

On politics: It’s difficult not to take disagreements about sexual behavior personally, but we can cultivate the ability to consider not just our own choices but the ...

This Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year will also be the busiest day for labor organizing, as Walmart store associates and community supporters spend their Thanksgiving holidays on the picket lines.

Organizers announced that last week’s walkouts at Walmart locations in California, Texas, and Seattle were the first wave of an expected 1,000 protests across the country leading up to and on Black Friday. The public can expect strikes and protests in Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, Milwaukee, and Washington, D.C., as well as walkouts in Oklahoma, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Minnesota, among other states.

Over the past year, groups including Warehouse Workers United, United Food & Commercial Workers, the National Guestworker Alliance, and OUR Walmart, a union-backed organization founded by Walmart workers, have come together to confront Walmart. Unsafe working conditions, poverty-level wages, a rise in already expensive health care premiums, and retaliation against workers’ organizing have encouraged many to join the strike instead of clocking in for the annual shopping holiday.

Worker discontent has been mounting since June, when guestworkers at a small seafood supplier for Walmart—immigrants in the U.S. on temporary work visas—walked off the job at their Louisiana plant and brought attention to labor abuses down the Walmart supply chain. Marches in California and Chicago for Walmart warehouse workers followed soon after.

One of the biggest concerns of workers and labor activists organizing actions for Black Friday is wealth inequality within the Walmart company. According to a report by the Huffington Post, a low-level Walmart employee averages $8 ...

“CLOSED. Happy Thanksgiving,” read a handwritten plywood sign propped against a makeshift tire barrier outside a work site for the Keystone XL pipeline in rural East Texas. For those who had come to protest and engage in civil disobedience against the pipeline’s construction, the message made clear that their visit was expected. It was still just the Monday before Thanksgiving, making for a surprisingly early break for a project that has been fast-tracked at practically every level of government. Such enthusiasm for a U.S. holiday hardly seemed right for TransCanada, the Calgary-based energy corporation building the pipeline.

Not that the activists’ presence was any kind of secret. Tar Sands Blockade, the campaign seeking to stop the pipeline connecting Alberta’s tar sands to Texas’s oil refineries and shipping ports, had announced the day’s mass action a week earlier. The only real surprises were the two locations that the campaign would be targeting, which the organizers kept hidden — even to fellow participants — right up until the last minute.

Their goal was to shut down construction for a day. The real imperative, however, was directing media attention to a pipeline that poses a significant danger to the health of the local community, as well as to the global climate.

Four activists came prepared to lock themselves to construction equipment, and despite the closure of the site by TransCanada, they went ahead as planned. Another ...

Tomorrow, Americans will prepare and serve about 45 million turkeys. This bounty is worthy of our thanks, but the conditions in which most of these birds were raised are not. Today, the overwhelming majority of turkeys we eat are produced in ways that endanger our environment and the public’s health—and it does not have to be this way.

According to a recent report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), 96 percent of turkeys were raised in facilities that produced at least 30,000 birds per year. These industrial operations are a far cry from the average farm of 50 years ago, which raised just 225 birds annually. Turkey production has increased almost seven-fold since then, but the birds now come from 150,000 fewer farms.

Across the U.S., industrial farms generate manure—and lots of it. Last year, 248 million turkeys raised in the U.S. generated more than two million tons of waste. Animal agriculture overall generates about 1 billion tons of manure each year. Much of this is applied to crops as fertilizer, but often in quantities too high for the plants to absorb, so it simply runs off into nearby waterways.

The waste contains a range of pollutants, including excess nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus. These elements create “dead zones” in downstream waters where a lack of oxygen destroys numerous species that are vital to healthy ecosystems that provide food and livelihoods for millions of people. In 2008, runoff ...

“We are standing up to live better,” say Walmart’s retail workers, playfully twisting Walmart’s slogan of “live better” into a rallying cry for better conditions and treatment. In a taste of what the nation’s largest retailer can expect on Black Friday, frustrated Walmart workers have again started walking off their jobs to protest their employer’s attempts to silence outspoken workers.

Workers from both the retail and warehouse sectors of Walmart’s supply chain have called for nation-wide protests, strikes and actions on, and leading up to, next Friday — the busiest shopping day of the year. In the past week, wildcat strikes in Dallas, Seattle and the Bay Area saw dozens of retail workers — from multiple store — walk away from their shifts, suggesting that the Black Friday threats are to be taken seriously.

Dan Schlademan, Director of the Making Change at Walmart campaign, said in a nation-wide conference call organized for media on Thursday that Walmart can expect more than 1,000 different protests, including strikes and rallies at Walmart stores between now and Black Friday.

According to organizers working with the Walmart retail workers’ association, OUR Walmart, stores around the country — including, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, Milwaukee, Washington D.C. and others — can expect workers to go on strike. Specific dates have not been ...

One would think it would be easy to get a “no” from anyone who you asked would be willing to wake-up at 3 a.m. on a cold November day to fight through hectic traffic and elbow people for $2 toasters instead of stay home and sleep off their turkey coma on the day after Thanksgiving. But despite that fact, Walmart makes a killing, literally, off of “Black Friday” discounts that have led to the deaths of both workers and shoppers in their encouragement of a mad consumerist dash for cheap deals on cheap products.

Imagine if Walmart workers across a wide swath of states refused to come to work on the company’s busiest day, forcing a shutdown of several branches of the retailer’s stores? It would be a huge win for workers over corporate greed and savage consumerism.

If you hate corporate greed, Walmart is a great adversary. They have aggressive policies in place to stop workers from hitting the overtime pay mark (34 hours), paying many of their workers just above the bare minimum wage while the Walton family rakes in countless profits. In fact, the average yearly income of one of Walmart’s minimum-wage workers, $15,080, is the same amount the six Waltons who own the chain make in just 3 minutes of dividends. Those 6 people who own the retail chain have actually amassed more wealth than the bottom 41.5% of ...

In 1977, two Boeing 747s collided on an airstrip in the Canary Islands. According to accident investigators, those who survived the initial blast in one plane had time to escape before a fire consumed the wreckage. But eyewitnesses reported that many remained in their seat looking perfectly content — as if nothing was wrong.

Not surprisingly, dozens of these dazed victims were burned to death, and the episode became a reminder of the so-called normalcy bias — a cognitive phenomenon whereby many who are faced with imminent disaster instantly convince themselves that everything is normal and that they don't have to modify their behavior.

Unpleasant as this anecdote is to recount, it exemplifies the psychology at the root of one of America's most destructive traits: our obsession with materialism and consumerism. To extrapolate the metaphor, if our damaged economy, record-low savings rate and sky-high personal debt levels are that smoldering plane about to explode, then America's "shop till you drop" normalcy bias may be engineering yet another avoidable tragedy.

The most recent holiday binge exemplified the impending crisis. Despite persistent unemployment, flat wages and higher prices for necessities (food, health care, etc.), America nonetheless went on its usual post-Thanksgiving buying spree.