This morning brought unsettling news. The Court of Appeals in the Philippines upheld the conviction for Nobel laureate Maria Ressa and her former colleague at Rappler, Rey Santos Jr., all but ensuring she could see as many as 100 years in prison on charges of criminal cyber libel. You read that right: if convicted on […]
Tag: CNN
Quarantine, Day 300: New Year’s Eve Edition
The blankets are all over the floor even though I prefer them folded and put away when they aren’t in use. I have like five pillows from the bedroom that have ended up in the living room over the course of the last few days, and I just haven’t bothered to move them. To my […]
The Mass Radicalization of the American Populace
Born in Nashville and having lived there for several years, I’ve been following the recent bombing very closely. The two blocks that were bombed look more like a street in downtown Aleppo than music city. Some of our family as far south as Murfreesboro could not make contact during Christmas and for forty-eight hours afterward […]
Broken Shells in all their Goodness
On the southwestern tip of Shelter Island, there’s a hidden public beach called Shell Beach. I say it’s hidden because you could easily drive right by the unmarked turn-off for it in a residential area and never know it was there. But the beach itself is nearly a mile-long peninsula just barely wide enough for […]
How the Gay Marriage Debate Reveals Negative Attitudes toward the Adopted
There’s an article on the front page of CNN today, an opinion piece, that defends traditional marriage. Because it would violate the First Amendment’s establishment clause to do so, the argument – like the one that will be heard before the Supreme Court soon – is void of any religious language. Even if conservative Christianity […]
A Full Picture, or the time a Moroccan tried to bomb the U.S. Capitol but was in no way representative of Morocco
One of the major goals of the Peace Corps, if not also one of the sole reasons for its existence, is simply to educate folks back home about the countries we live and work in during our two-year tenure. If I had ended up in Peace Corps Eastern Caribbean like I was supposed to, I […]
