I swore I’d stop writing about liberal guilt
& about cats too, but I must confess
last night, I groomed our little black cat
with my tongue
J.D. Vance grew up in a small, poor city in the Rust Belt of southern Ohio, where he had a front-row seat to many of the social ills plaguing America: a heroin epidemic, failing schools, families torn apart by divorce and sometimes violence.
Winner of the 2019 Jury Award at SXSW, Director Kristian Mercado Figueroa’s music video PA’LANTE performed by Hurray for the Riff Raff takes us inside the Puerto Rican experience of life post Hurricane Maria and the pressures facing an estranged family attempting to reconnect amid the wreckage.
Standing, a girl-boy, on the junked car in the dump,
some other kids across the dump standing on their cars
How This Country Fails Its Most Vulnerable: A Field Guide to Our Threadbare Social Safety Net.
Catherine Doty’s pitiless poems beautifully show us what we don’t want to see: children’s poverty, abuse, neglect. And their meanness. Poor children living in squalor, which Doty’s language often veils in lyrical glamor.
Remaking the Economy for the People
The dead man was no one, just a man in tattered clothes, no shoes, just a coin in his pocket, no id cards, no bus ticket. He was a nobody, … Continue reading →
For Willem, age 3 . We are lost. . Holding you tight, the drunks pawing me . as I weave through the stalls sticky with beer and urine . looking … Continue reading →
Dirt and hunger. Foreheads burnt, no, branded by heat. Backpacks. Paper cups. Bundles that are everything we own. Beneath the gargoyles, our babies sleep. We used to have houses. Once … Continue reading →
This is legendary bluesman Willie King’s tribute to his mother, a very powerful performance about his upbringing in Prairie Point, a community in Noxubee County, Mississippi near the Alabama border.
The American people must make a fundamental decision. Do we continue the 40-year decline of our middle class and the growing gap between the very rich and everyone else, or … Continue reading →
This four-minute documentary revolves around a letter written in the future to society today. The narrator tells us, the stranger, how things went right. Society gathered with a fundamental belief … Continue reading →
So often it’s the beaten old, paint peeling downtown house with the broken bicycle on the front porch and uncut grass covering the tiny front yard that has a … Continue reading →