Reading Time: 6 minutes In the name of the culture war, Republican states are impoverishing and killing their own citizens.
earthquake of perspective
Posted inViolence
Skipping America: US gun culture has the rest of the world keeping its distance
Reading Time: 6 minutes In late May of this year, while reeling from the news of the mass shootings in a Buffalo, NY grocery store and Uvalde, TX elementary school, I found myself thinking about which progressive country with sensible gun regulations I could emigrate to. A place where my husband and I could send our son to school […]
Posted inPolitics
The middle of history
Reading Time: 5 minutes Why today’s utopian ideologies are unlikely to take us all the way to utopia.
Posted inReligion
The origins of circumcision: Was it a mark of slavery?
Reading Time: 6 minutes Nothing says religious belief better than disfiguring your own genitalia. Or better still, someone else’s. But, seriously, why? From a philosophical point of view, and considering OmniGod (all-powerful, -knowing, and-loving) who designed and created everything, the procedure of circumcision, the removal of the foreskin from the penis, is bizarre. Why would God, who designed human […]
Posted inTrue Story
Wherever we might ‘sonder’, there are microcosms we will never know
Reading Time: 8 minutes Around 5 a.m. every day, a man in his late fifties boards a non-integrated bus just north of Medellín, which takes around 45 minutes in early morning traffic to reach his stop, a 20-minute walk to a plot of public space where he will set up shop for the morning and midday. A non-integrated bus […]
Posted inViolence
Mass killings: Why we need to see the murdered innocents
Reading Time: 7 minutes For several decades beginning in the 1950s, driver education classes in the United States included screenings of “shock films”—documentary shorts, narrated in police drama style, created to bring the reality of high-speed collisions home to young drivers. Names like Highway of Agony, Mechanized Death, and Red Asphalt were meant to terrify teenagers into driving safely. […]
Posted inLGBTQ
The transgender swimming ban is not about sports
Reading Time: 6 minutes FINA, the international swimming federation, has banned trans women from competing in women’s categories for the sports it governs. Within days of this announcement, a raft of other sporting bodies had announced reviews of their policies for transgender inclusion, and the International Rugby League banned trans women from competition, pending “further research.” The decision has […]
Posted inParenting & Family
Of curious women and dead cats
Reading Time: 6 minutes OnlySky · Of curious women and dead cats | Dale McGowan Search not to find what lies too deeply hid Nor to know things whose knowledge is forbid. That bad advice is from John Denham, an English poet and politician in the 17th century. Bad advice, but also really common in our culture. If we […]
Posted inSpace
Preview images from James Webb telescope ‘moved me as a human being’
Reading Time: 2 minutes The reactions of NASA astrophysicists and engineers to the first images from the revolutionary James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) go well beyond the thrill of new knowledge. The images “moved me, as a scientist, as an engineer, and as a human being,” said NASA deputy administrator and former astronaut Pamela Melroy. Thomas Zurbuchen, leader of NASA’s […]
Posted inEducation
What’s the point of education?
Reading Time: 6 minutes No, really, what is the point? I ask this in light of recent UK government potential demands on universities that they are putting out to consultation. Known as “public comment” in the U.S., this is where the government seeks input from the public and stakeholders concerning a proposed change of policy or similar, partly to […]