Tony Gloeggler: Blessings
The moral of these stories is that all blessings are mixed —From John Updike’s TOO FAR TO GO These days we make appointments to play slow motion basketball in Long … Continue reading
Elizabeth Gargano: How Parables Teach Us Who We Are
Octavia Butler’s novel begins in what then seemed a distant future, our current year of 2024. Lauren Olamina, the novel’s protagonist, leads a ragged band of followers through an America that is coming apart at the seams.
Jake Johnson: UN Rights Chief Demands International Probe of Mass Graves Near Gaza Hospitals
More than 300 bodies were reportedly discovered in the mass grave near the Nasser facility in Khan Younis, Gaza, and eyewitnesses said Israeli soldiers executed civilians during their two-week-long raid of al-Shifa last month.
Joan E. Bauer: Remembering Sanora Babb
Ray Bradbury knew Babb from a longtime workshop: The author of a promising Dust Bowl novel that editor Bennet Cerf shelved in ‘39, saying— What rotten luck! claiming her work … Continue reading
Laurence Musgrove: All
We learn all kinds of things
Whether they are taught to us or not,
And nothing is more deeply learned than
What it means to be among our own.
Desne A. Crossley: O Rosie Girl
it was one thing for a white man to bed a black woman, but unthinkable that he would marry her. And it was commonplace for a black woman to be forced to open her legs to her employer or his sons. But Martha married white and returned home with the man!
Rose Mary Boehm: “Apolitical Preferences” by Hans Magnus Enzensberger
The cellist’s little smile
after the cadenza in the second movement,
even though the Security Council
just convened
Juan Cole: The US House Just Gave Israel $26 Billion for Its War on Gaza’s Children
The enormous windfall will allow the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to continue to kill or wound a Palestinian child in Gaza every 10 minutes.
Baron Wormser: The System
Humankind never has been very aware of the consequences of their group actions, perhaps because large groups, in particular, are inherently thoughtless.
Video: Heading South
In this poignant understated film, eight year old Chasuna travels from her home on the Mongolian grassland to visit her father who lives in the big city.
Jose Padua: Another Friday Night Lost in My Head vs. the Collected Songs of the Filipino Genius
the people have
heard enough of everything
that’s real and want nothing
more than something
that’s easy to believe
John Zheng | Valediction: Poems and Prose by Linda Parsons
Parsons’s contemplation moves from shaping garden beds to shaping life. Garden is an island of necessity where her “orbits in and out of the perennial beds” have shaped her life for thirty years.
Olivia Rosane: USC Cancels Muslim Valedictorian’s Speech
“USC offers a minor in ‘resistance to genocide,’ this girl minored in it, was named valedictorian, and then they cancelled her speech because she might talk about genocide.”
Jessica Corbett: Mehdi Hasan Launches Media Platform With Naomi Klein, Greta Thunberg, and More
The journalist says Zeteo will feature “hard-hitting interviews and unsparing analysis” in op-eds, podcasts, and streaming shows.
