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Articles Written By Bruce Murphy

Bruce F. Murphy is a freelance writer living in Rome. He is the editor of Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (1996; 2008) and the author of several books. His poems, essays, and stories have appeared in Poetry, Commonweal, the Paris Review, Critical Inquiry, and elsewhere.

Op-Ed

Water to Burn?
by Bruce Murphy
Today is UN World Water Day, and for many of the planet’s residents, one of our most plentiful resources has become all too scarce. The rest of us are busy playing golf in the desert.
Fight or Flight

Everyone’s Wild About Tami
by Bruce Murphy
After months of near-silence, bird flu is back on the West’s front pages. But where is government preparedness, now that the drug of choice in the virus war turns out to have spawned resistant strains?
Fight or Flight

No Man Is an Island
by Bruce Murphy
Considering what may lie ahead otherwise, no amount of money is too great to devote to the fight against avian flu. But while everybody’s spending against each other’s contingency plans, we’re all left risking something too precious to lose.
Fight or Flight

An Ounce of Prevention
by Bruce Murphy
We don’t yet know whether the avian flu will become a pandemic. So why are we preparing for a plague instead of fighting the virus where it currently rages—in the animal kingdom? Conflicting reports and strategies still march on, but time may be running out.
Opinions

What Would Teddy Do?
by Bruce Murphy
Last week Maine citizens voted on Question 2—whether or not to outlaw the “baiting, hounding, and trapping” of bears. So why didn’t such an apparently humane measure pass?