Written in spring 2013   My toes are hairy; fine enough hairs on the four little toes to go unnoticed but the big toes betray my Hispanic roots more than any other feature.  In Middlesex Jeffrey Eugenides defines the “Hair Belt” across Eurasia but he forgot to jump oceans and include us bestial Latino folk,Read moreRead more

I haven’t written in a while; it’s been a long come-down from ten years of scratching away against injustice in the non-profit and cause-based sphere, earning sub-poverty wages while I strove to lift others to better lives.  I don’t regret the work, but I do regard it very critically.   This had been an issueRead moreRead more

I wrote this a few days ago but wasn’t comfortable posting it right away.  Then I read this and was inspired to just go ahead and do the damn thing. Here we are. Coming back… Squatting is a strange thing.  Both places that I’ve squatted were places I had access to, technical permission to occupyRead moreRead more

For the last decade and change, I’ve had an occasional recurring dream: not a nightmare per se but the kind of too-obvious subconscious excavation that leaves one restless and edgy upon waking, sleep spent in the company of what-ifs and might-have-beens.  In my dream I don’t revisit scenes from my own life but rather thoseRead moreRead more

Forgive me. I have not yet fully worked this all out. But Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn describes the prisoners headed to the Soviet Gulag as waves flowing underground. These waves “provided sewage disposal for the life flowering on the surface.” I understand this to mean that the gulag was not just mindless evil—was not just incomprehensible insanity—butRead moreRead more

Ta-Nehisi Coates weighs in on Bill Cosby, and his own previous failures to confront the rape accusations.  It’s a reckoning, and a lesson in how to face – and own – our shortcomings.   The alternative: this perfect Onion piece.   Issues of privilege – white privilege, male privilege, the privileges of fame and celebrityRead moreRead more

There’s a fascinating article in The New Yorker which discusses the notion – the contemporary American religion, perhaps – of performance improvement.  The subject is introduced via a discussion of athletics, where performance (as RBIs or race times or free throw percentages, or whatever the contest may be about) is fairly easily to quantify andRead moreRead more

When it comes to education reform, the reliance on “data” is purported to be a values-neutral statement: data has no ideology, this line of thinking goes, so its use cannot be manipulated.   Two important articles – one very long, the other less so – illuminate the lie at work in this proposition.  First, theRead moreRead more

I wrote this two weeks ago.  I sat on it for a bit but have decided to go ahead and put it into the world now. behold the gates of mercy/an arbitrary space and none of us deserving of the cruelty or the grace… (sincerely, l. cohen.) Like so many others I am surprised byRead moreRead more

Generally speaking, I don’t recommend staying up late at night by oneself to watch a television show about a serial killer.  Unless that show is “The Fall.”   “The Fall” is a BBC show with one five-episode season under its belt – barely a blip, by American television standards – and a second due inRead moreRead more