The Real Alaska Daily

CELINA, OH - A little over a year ago, Sue Markins' phone rang. The caller said she was calling on behalf of her birth family in Japan. Markins, a Walmart pharmacy technician, was flummoxed by the call from an overseas stranger. "I hung right up," she recalls. "In...

Today I write about an Arcanum, Ohio native opposed not only to the start of that last war in Afghanistan, but also the Vietnam War. Her maiden name was Marianna Munn. She was the farmer’s daughter of Eva and John Munn, the latter the longtime head of the school board...

My personality was formed by two different worlds I inhabited before I was 20 when I set out to earn a living as a writer and professor. I lived then in tough Buffalo, New York, neighborhoods during the week and on my two grandparents’ bucolic farms on weekends and...

All -- This is a remembrance of my visit to a leper colony.  It may change your thinking on leprosy. It changed mine.     By Hank Nuwer Some of my best feature stories never appeared in print. That’s because the era from 1976 to 1992 — when I wrote every...

Sunday, March 5, 2023 Good day, Reader:  I was thinking of adding one of the strangest and saddest columns I ever penned.  So here it is. I won't say, "Enjoy!" But maybe you'll learn something about groupthink with this tale from the past in Union City, Indiana. As a...

I spent the morning hiring freelancers for the Fairbanks Daily Miner's visitor guide, and then put on the coffee and settled into housecleaning.  Two loads of laundry were followed by kitchen counter scrubbing, oven cleaning, vacuuming, swabbing all decks and,...