“She’d come to California a couple weeks before, staying with her brother, reminding me of how my mom relied, at times, on my Uncle Ken.” (nonfiction)
Category: Nonfiction
Only the life of a human being has meaning, but we cannot decide what that meaning is. (nonfiction)
Years passed. The joke continued. So did the dustings. (nonfiction)
Walking changed her. (nonfiction)
So now what are we going to do? (nonfiction)
“The invisible turns home into battlegrounds and destroys the romance between man and woman. These details never make it to history books.” (nonfiction)
My brother, sister, and I climbed the steps of the fire escape at the local hospital, and our dad opened the door from the inside as we snuck into our mother’s room one by one, all too young to officially visit our mother. (nonfiction)
“While the rest of the department read books, wrote papers, and graded student work, Tim and Rick printed out pictures of clowns.” (nonfiction)
O, America, a horse like us would have been glue by now. (nonfiction)
How I loved sitting on a barstool listening to James choose his words to perfection and pronounce them in a way that was subtle and glowing, as if they were wrapped in beautiful paper.
Perhaps they found another way. Perhaps they could stop. Perhaps they just go to church. What I wouldn’t give to possess their simple freedoms. (Nonfiction)
There is a small Italian restaurant two blocks from my house in Inner N.E. Portland. It’s been there for decades.
You spend the winter telling me it’s almost summer. (Nonfiction)
(Nonfiction) We don’t know names, on our street.
“‘Chicago has nothing to be ashamed of in comparison with New York.'” (1918)
I loved her. But I never, ever felt close to her. The few times I tried to speak honestly to her as I struggled to understand how I’d come to see the world as I did, she was so hurt that it would have been cruel to persist.
In the city that some used to call the Seattle of Italy, nowadays you can only overdose on poetry.
“What have they been feeding you in here?” I ask.
“A bunch of bullshit!”
So here I am writing about it in America.
As children under Nixon and teens under Reagan, first-wave Generation Xers like myself have spent our lives watching the rout of the political left from power. Progressive reforms from the New Deal and Great Society were dismantled piecemeal to enrich a profiteering few.
It’s the last corner of paradise, here, evaporating like spit on a hot sidewalk.
Oak Woods Cemetery is located in the predominantly African-American neighborhood of Grand Crossing, and the Confederate Monument towers over the gravesite of the Chicagoan suffragist and anti-lynching activist Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, a former slave.
The professor should have burned the letters. He had no right to give them to a stranger.
In December 1989 in Romania, the crowds spilling into the streets chanted: ‘We will die and we will be free!’
Now, I sometimes want to go back to that time and say, “Goddammit, kid, what the hell is wrong with you? You don’t seek comfort in the same hands that dangled you off a ledge; you always keep your back up when around a person who’s low enough to attack you from behind; and, if someone cuts off a chunk of your flesh, you stay away. “
I asked why I was being taken aside. A woman in uniform and gloves told me I had to be screened for bomb paraphernalia.
“Do you speak English?” she asked me. This was after I had asked her why I was being taken aside, in perfect English.
I can’t conceptualize the poverty. None of us can. How do you make something of yourself in a new country when you came here with nothing?? When you’ve been starving for years in your own country and come here to a land with so much food, so much sweet smelling, fattening, beautiful food … and you with no money to buy it.
Almost seventy years after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, and while the Hong Kong protests continue, Richard Wirick looks back at the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and the violent government crackdown.
It becomes increasingly clear, then, that the government does not intend to use its army as an institution of pure militaristic purpose. If it did, then it would have focused on quality over quantity, promoting a career in the army as something prestigious and sought-after rather than what it is now – a year-long fever dream between youth and adulthood for those who don’t do well on the national exams.
Imprisoned behind glass in New York City’s Jewish Museum: a sinister grin in graphite. Too big-teeth and hairy brows crowned with a jester’s coxcomb. “I wanted something visually exciting,” Jerry Robinson said of his concept sketch of The Joker. “I wanted something that would make an indelible impression, would be bizarre, would be memorable.”
