Posts Tagged ‘resistance’
What Poetry Can Teach Us About Parenting in the Age of Trump
July 9, 2019
I’ve been working on an essay on another subject for weeks now, taking notes about poetry and desire, desire and the search for God. But whenever I sit down to write, all I can think about are concentration camps. It happens every night when I get in bed, too. I get under the covers, my body begins to…
Read MoreZahra’s Paradise: A Lament for Iran
May 30, 2019
In their their graphic novel, Zahra’s Paradise, author Amir and illustrator Khalil open with a mundane but striking image for life in Iran. A family’s dog has a litter of puppies, and the boy begins to name them after figures from Persian literature. The father, however, chases the mother dog off with rocks, shouting, “Shoo,…
Read MoreHeisenberg and the A-Bomb: Just Say No
March 27, 2017
I read through the article breathlessly, astonished at the moral implications of what I was learning. When I got to the end, I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, trying to begin to take in the import of what I’d just read. The article was “The Private Heisenberg and the Absent Bomb,” by Thomas Powers,…
Read MoreI Am an American
March 2, 2017
I refresh the page, I refresh the page, I turn away for a few minutes, I teach a class for seventy-five minutes, I sit in a meeting for sixty minutes, and on the way to the meeting, on the way back to my office from the class, with my iPhone in my palm, at the…
Read MorePieces of Resistance
June 16, 2016
We’ve beat records for rain this year in central Minnesota. The sidewalks are pillowed with lilacs, and Saint Paul’s hundred-year-old storm sewers bring up syringes and squirrel tails and fish dropped by eagles over the Mississippi’s shore. The rain stains the sides of old high-rises; I love to walk in it and look at the…
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