When Rin aced the Keju—the Empire-wide test to find the most talented youth to learn at the Academies—it was a shock to everyone: to the test officials, who couldn’t believe a war orphan from Rooster Province could pass without cheating; to Rin’s guardians, who believed they’d fina...
The image was made on a foredune near the Michigan shoreline, not long after Zeke and I bounded down a high, steep dune (upper right in the photo) through powdery sand that supposedly “sings” when walked upon. We spotted that tree just after we landed. My photographer friend headed str...
It’s not just the police who enforce systemic racism, white people like me do as well: We call the cops on Black birdwatchers in Central Park or Starbucks customers in Philadelphia or Harvard professors opening their own front door in Cambridge, MA. It’s infuriating that we are all still...
Finally, while movies like the first two Godfather films, Nashville and Taxi Driver may have been the ones that had critics then and now wax rhapsodic about the movies, as well as the people who made them (Coppola, Altman, Scorsese, and others) and the actors who appeared in them (Pacino...
At the memorial, a band plays while a young woman – also too young to remember the Wall standing – sings an old protest song and the crowd clap politely along. There are flowers at the memorials to the victims of the Wall, but the atmosphere is positive, even if the anniversary of ...
Think about that for a moment – amidst all the different types of plant fibers and materials that are present in an eastern deciduous forest, she still made the decision to travel hundreds of meters across an open pasture, where she is certainly more vulnerable to predation by raptors like ...
ELVES AND HEROES BY DONALD A. MACKENZIE. 1909 TO Miss YULE, of TARRADALE. PREFACE. THE ELVES. The immemorial folk-beliefs of our native land are passing away, but they still retain for us a poetic appeal, not only on account of the glamour of early assoc
This song tells of that kind of life, and what one woman is willing to do in order to get away from the chaos. Tracy Chapman sings about hopes lost and finding one’s personal power amidst all the hardships one has been through. (Here are more songs about hope.) ...
Amidst the lovingly recreated beehive hairdos and silly fad dances, the vile Von Tussle (played with gleeful nastiness by Colleen Fitzpatrick, aka pop star Vitamin C) revels in her society’s every institutionalized privilege. Sabotaging the indefatigable Tracy’s attempts to allow her Black ...
and helpful nuggets of advice; I just seem to have forgotten nearly all of them in the meantime.Anyhow, I’m not actually certain how all this happened; I just kept saying, “Yes” to everything, for I felt like a bird whose wings have been drenched. – And so I had, thank God,...