Tom Weis: History Will Damn Trump & Co. for Betraying the Vision of Our Founders
Healing begins with putting Trump’s exhausting psychodrama behind us and getting back to loving and caring for one another as Americans.
Charles W. Brice: Stupidity
The guy in his MAGA cap
yells at my friend
that she’s a scaremonger
for wearing a mask
Derrick Z. Jackson: As the Virus Rampages through Washington, Essential Workers Nationwide Are Paying the Price
Essential workers in the United States continue to face relentless and tragic pressures, most notably from federal and state leaders who dismiss the science on COVID-19, and from bosses who mock the use of masks, skirt or ignore recommended safety protocols, and skimp on protective equipment.
Jason Irwin: Their Hands
All I remember were their hands holding me down: my mother’s father’s, a young nurse who gripped my left arm, and the doctor, who, before each prick into my skin, assured me it wasn’t a needle, just his finger.
Rachel Hadas:’What goes around comes around,’ or what Greek mythology says about Donald Trump
When I studied and taught Sophocles’ tragedy “Oedipus the King,” the stress was on hubris, irony, blindness. What wasn’t emphasized is that the play was written during and is set in the midst of a plague.
Tayve Neese: Inside her muscle, a blossom,
This is what the tumor had done,
reduced the whole world to nothing
but metaphor
Michael Simms: Why we must win
The Democrats have to win the 2020 election. Our survival as a nation, and perhaps as a species, depends on removing the criminal organization that the GOP has become and starting our journey to a just society. We owe this victory to our children and our grandchildren.
Tony Whedon: Field of Vision | Blues and Greens
Between this and that, my wife, my dear little cowslip,
was misdiagnosed with heart failure and everything I loved
lost its pigment. The old reds weren’t red anymore,
the rose bushes on the path by the river had lost their pink
Paul Christensen: The October Twilight
Leaf by leaf, the sky unfolds its ancient sunlight and lets the fragments of history drift to the ground, one broken fact at a time. How difficult it is to gather up the ruins of time and try to make sense of what we are — the foreground we emerged from, the burden of our legacy as inheritors of shame and guilt.
Video: Anne Lamott | 12 Truths I Learned from Life and Writing
If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.
Video: Sophie Scott | Why We Laugh
While exploring the neuroscience of speech and vocal behavior, Sophie Scott stumbled upon a surprising second vocation: making audiences laugh as a stand-up comic.
Video: Keith Olbermann |Donald Trump is a Mass Murderer
While Trump is claiming getting Covid was a “gift from God,” the reality is, he’s an inhuman creature and a terrorist whose fear of wearing a mask will kill thousands unnecessarily. His reign of terror must end.
Doug Anderson: Prancing
I remember sitting on the sofa in my grandparent’s house–my day care center–watching television with my grandfather.
Jeanette Callahan, MD: I Don’t Have Qualified Immunity; Why Should Police?
Impunity means that even at the height of nationwide scrutiny and outrage, police officers in Kenosha still felt entitled to shoot Jacob Blake, an unarmed black man, seven times in the back while his children watched, paralyzing him from the waist down.
