“Two North” is a story about one Christmas when my mom was spending time on the psychiatric ward of our town’s hospital after trying to commit suicide to escape a physically-abusive husband. I was thirteen. It was a cataclysmic event in our lives but it brought us together into a two-person tribe like no other event ever has in my […]

Cultural conservatives are trying to make the 2022 midterm elections about education in general, and the (phantom) issue of “parental rights” specifically. As someone who has been involved in education at various levels for the past 40+ years, I’ve not seen any evidence of a widespread lack of parents’ abilities to guide and influence their children’s schooling. To be sure, […]

Moms for Liberty (M4L), an astro-turf group that is probably not actually many moms and definitely not about liberty, has moved on. While they didn’t seem too afraid of a deadly virus that killed almost 6.5 million people around the globe—as evidenced by their increasingly dramatic and dangerous anti-mask and anti-vaccine protests at school board meetings across the country—they are […]

One of my favorite Twitter follows is @BodegaCats_. The feed posts adorable pictures of … wait for it … cats in bodegas. When I saw this tweet by @NewVoiceUkraine, I tweeted at @BodegaCats_ suggesting they make an exception to their “only cats in bodegas” policy because it’s such a powerful image: Someone later pointed out that the image is from […]

Gathering petition signatures is an act as old as democracy itself. It is direct and easy to understand: Sign the petition to show your support. Sign the petition and the person or issue will be placed on the ballot for everyone to decide on. Many of us have signed or circulated petitions for issues or candidates that we believe in.  […]

“Two North” is a story about one Christmas when my mom was spending time on the psychiatric ward of our town’s hospital after trying to commit suicide to escape a physically-abusive husband. I was thirteen. It was a cataclysmic event in our lives but it brought us together into a two-person tribe like no other event ever has in my […]

So, about Virginia… The election in Virginia was not about “education”–it was about racism, and white supremacy. Maybe if establishment Democrats hadn’t tacked hard right on education, starting with Bill Clinton and reaching a crescendo with Barack Obama and Arne Duncan, we wouldn’t have given up the “high road” on public education. There’s been a lot of discussion about the […]

Like most Americans, you probably pay a LOT of money for the prescription drugs used by you and your family. The statistics about prescription drug use in America are rather shocking: Sixty-six percent of adults take at least one prescription medicine and one-quarter take four or more. More than a third of Americans have skipped taking a prescription medicine because […]

There’s a great deal of discussion surrounding the reasons that there are so many job vacancies right now at a time when unemployment levels are high. No matter how you analyze it, however, there is simply no getting around the fact that, along with wages that haven’t kept up with the cost of living, it’s lack of available, affordable, reliable […]

With the American war in Afghanistan now effectively finished and our military presence in Iraq and Syria all but over, you might think America would now be enjoying a peace dividend. This is, however, entirely NOT the case. In fact, Congress is set to pass one the largest military budgets in our nation’s history. But it gets worse. The Pentagon […]

Pretty much all of us have insurance of one sort or another. We (hopefully) have health insurance. Some of us have life insurance. We have insurance on our cars, on our homes, sometimes even on our pets. Insurance is designed so that you pay a small amount on a regular basis over time. Then, if you need it, it’s there […]