Posts

People of Gaza, We Hear You

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I 'd been thinking vaguely about writing some kind of account of what I've been up to lately, a bout what's been going on for the past six weeks in Israel / Palestine, and not just in Gaza but in the West Bank, too. Then this afternoon, this video popped up first in t oday's TikTok feed. I'm so glad it did , because as I wrote in 5 languages in text and WhatsApp messages I sent with the link to friends and family, it re-lighted the fire that's been burning under my ass for weeks now . Before reading on , please watch it . No dead bodies (visible), no screaming injured children ; j ust a guy talking about what happened Nov. 18, 2023, in his home-town: Khan Younis, Gaza, Occupied Palestine. Watch it here . About five or six times in the past couple of weeks, a fter clocking out around noon from the café where I work, and retrievi ng a sign that I made, I 've walked around downtow n for an hour or so, holding the sign above my head ( with my hands; it

My Life After Peace Corps

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For those of you lacking the time or inclination to run your eyeballs over the unabridged version of My Life After Peace Corps , I have also prepared this more reader-friendly, abridged version: NM, NK: QAF And now! For those with the stamina and the attention span, please enjoy the unabridged, unauthorized yet somehow official version of MLAPC. While definitely not the whole nine yards, there's definitely enough here to set sail with, lol After two years teaching English in Bossangoa, sharing a 3-bedroom house with Karen McKay, Mike Boennighausen, and hundreds of bats ... and after traveling all over the country with Mark Lynd, Mary Jeannot, Joe McCright, Tom Akin, and two Central African teachers of English (Bernard M'Beguida and Benjamin Kpaina) while writing a textbook for teachers of English in the C.A.R. ( no way we could've written it while sitting in one place) ... and after paddling a dugout canoe that someone christened the Cadillac of the Oubang

Book review: "The Race Beat," by Roberts and Klibanoff

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Almost as interesting these days as this book – The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (2007), by the journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff (which I hasten to assure you, was pretty damn gripping) – is how I stumbled across it in the first place , and for that story, we turn first to one Nikole Hannah-Jones . Hannah-Jones is the main creative force behind the 1619 Project , a journalistic endeavor published in the Aug. 14, 2019 issue of The New York Times Magazine . She is a recipient of a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship (the so-called genius grant), and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2020 . The 1619 Project was wildly popular, if also controversial in more conservative circles, and since then has morphed into several other projects, includ ing a highly informative and entertaining five-part podcast . A book, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story , came out last November. One of the goals of the 1619 Project is to promo