By Alexander Schuhr “Maybe you want to play with him,” the woman says, leading the little girl toward a toddler sitting in the sand. The boy doesn’t need anybody to play with. He is completely absorbed with his task of shoveling sand into a bucket. Nevertheless, this woman seems terribly eager to see her girl [...]
By Anne Anthony Dear Santa, You disappointed me. I was (mostly) good last year. Maybe I cursed, but I was frustrated and baffled. Somehow my family (?), my friends (?), my neighbors (?) voted in a president who—and I’ve got to be honest here—terrifies me. Did you even read my letter?? I quoted Pope Francis, [...]
By Jaime Gonzalez I remember it in sequential order, in the same way, no matter how or when I think about it. It was a month into the 2016 winter term at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, and we were on a five-minute break from my history class. Consistent with every other break, the first [...]
By Jamie Davenport Something entirely disturbing happened last night on my commute to rehearsal. Bear with me. It is a long tale. But one that is necessary to read and digest. I was sitting in the corner of the Red Line T, closest to the conductor, when a group of about eight black kids from [...]
By Sara Marchant My hands were full in the post office parking lot. I held out-going bills, my car and postal box keys, my purse, and a heavy manila envelope containing a manuscript destined for greatness (one can always hope, right?). When I heard a loud car horn and a male voice yelling “Votes for [...]
By Alexander Schuhr My grandfather farted a lot. Sometimes it took as little as rising from a chair or a slight adjustment of his position and he’d let one fly. In my preadolescent years, I used to burst into laughter. And why not? Among my classmates, a thunderous salute called for proper acknowledgement. Embarrassment was [...]
By Maggie Downs Gather your ingredients. You’ll need peanut butter, jelly, the bread of your choice, and a clean, sharp knife. Spread peanut butter evenly onto one side of the bread using your knife. Acknowledge the fact that the winner of our constitutionally legitimate but antiquated electoral process is a person who threatens democracy on [...]
By Tara Campbell On June 29, to little fanfare, the State Department reinstated the approximately sixty Foreign Service job offers it had abruptly rescinded from Pickering and Rangel Fellows earlier in the month. The Pickering and Rangel programs seek to diversify the U.S. Foreign Service by providing undergraduate and graduate scholarships and Foreign Service jobs to women, [...]
By H.L.M. Lee When I take my younger daughter to school, I see the rush of her first grade friends running to hug each other and share head lice (much to the chagrin of every parent). My daughter’s BFF has a father from England and a mother from Maine. Another girl’s father is Muslim and [...]
By Amy L. Freeman resist Last Thursday, I found that single word scrawled in black Sharpie on the cardboard inside a package of photos I’d ordered. Odd, I thought, turning over the first of my photos. The pictures were of me with my children, holding signs at the recent Women’s March, smiling and determined amidst [...]
By Karen Malpede It will get worse. Much worse with the Trump Administration fully in place. The Cabinet from hell, a collection of incompetents, racists, sexists, fossil fuel and other business moguls, Islamophobes, and ignoramuses, is in a slow, agonizing process of confirmation, one by one, against widespread civil protest and principled opposition from most [...]
By Margaret Morganroth Gullette As the entire world now knows, Dr. David Dao is the passenger who was dragged off a United Airlines Flight on April 9th by Chicago police who broke his nose, gave him a concussion and smashed two of his teeth. He may need restorative surgery. Some media have treated this as [...]
By Candy Schulman Editor's note: Trump's inauguration initiated a series of public demonstrations that have continued throughout his first 100 days—including, challenging his refusal to release his taxes, in support of science and the environment, in defiance of his bigoted attempts to limit immigration and, as this essay reminds us, to make clear the power of women inspired [...]
By Cong Tran Editor's note: Cong Tran, or Tran Quoc Cong in Vietnamese naming convention, paid his first visit to the United States in 2007, an invited guest at the memorial service for author and Pulitzer Prize winning Vietnam War correspondent David Halberstam. Mr. Tran had guided and ultimately befriended the journalist during a return visit to Vietnam by the [...]
By Easton Smith I was born in 1989, the same year that Francis Fukuyama published his essay, “The End of History?” The Berlin Wall fell that year, collapsing history (such a delicate thing, after all) underneath it. It was final: Liberal democracy and global capitalism were the inevitable tide to raise all boats. My whole [...]
