Michael Simms: The Courage of Teachers
In 1987, students gathered in front of the admin building angry over the corruption of the university’s board. The crowd was getting ugly. I was a young teacher standing to the side, listening to the speeches, watching warily as the crowd grew. Someone shouted Take Over the Administration! and the crowd chanted Take Over! Take over! Take Over! The crowd, now a mob…
Video: Black Owned — Chicago
Black Owned, a film series exploring the Black entrepreneurial spirit and its essential contribution to the American economy through the perspectives of business owners.
Rajan Menon: A Covid-19 Hell on Earth
How This Country Fails Its Most Vulnerable: A Field Guide to Our Threadbare Social Safety Net.
Kathleen O’Toole: On Grief, in a time of pandemic
What I’m learning about grief is that
it comes and goes, like the shadow in front of me
on the afternoon sidewalk.
Valerie Bacharach: Elegy for Nathan
An addict is an actor, able to look you in the eye, smile, and lie so convincingly that you begin to question yourself.
Ray Levy Uyeda: How Organizers Are Fighting an American Legacy of Forced Sterilization
The U.S. has a history of sterilizing women without their knowledge or permission, but states are working to make up for past mistakes.
Cynthia Atkins: Making Lunch
I pack a thermos, 2 cookies, tart apple slices that will later smile at you from a bag—My noontime missive, a text of seduction.
Pamela Haines, George Lakey: Why we must start imagining the world we want to live in
The center of America is not Washington, D.C. The center of America is the neighborhoods where 330 million Americans are raising their kids and trying to put food on the table and trying to love their neighbor. That’s the center of America.
Rachel Hadas: Trying to Get to School
But making my way from A to B
could not be managed easily.
Locked courtyard, blocked alleys, a high wall –
I had to cross or climb them all.
Hayden Saunier: How I Suit Up for Winter Storms
Boots from my son’s eighth grade year,
outgrown far faster than the heart-deep
humiliations he bore for being gay
that I could not protect him from.
Leslie Anne Mcilroy: Call Back
The pink half-gown is tied wrong.
I can’t figure out the strings.
My nipples are hard in the
fluorescent waiting room.
Ursula K. Le Guin: About Anger
Anger points powerfully to the denial of rights, but the exercise of rights can’t live and thrive on anger. It lives and thrives on the dogged pursuit of justice.
Anna Gotlibis: Trauma unmakes the world of the self. Can stories repair it?
Self-making narratives create the maps of the totality of our physical reality and experiences – or, as philosophers sometimes say, of the lifeworlds that we inhabit.
Sydney Lea: Gradus ad Parnassum
On the other hand, the open handed
blows left scarce a mark, applied to your head or neck
