My son was Darth Vader for Halloween and I told him with zero irony that when I was his age I would have killed another child for a costume as realistic as his. My first day of kindergarten I wore brown Darth Vader Stride Rites. It was 1980 and for some reason our Stride Rite […]
Beyond the obvious racial double standard (brown shooters are terrorists; white shooters are troubled anomalies), the concept of the misunderstood, homicidal outcast is a gateway to excusing abusive behavior at large. In an article published last Saturday titled “Suspect Lived Off the Grid but Left Trail of Disputes,” three New York Times writers opened with […]
I think she looks fabulous, but people sure have a lot of opinions about it. My 9-year-old daughter has never been shy about her preferences and opinions. Right before she began kindergarten, she asked if she could cut her hair short. Since then, it has varied in style, but has stayed pretty short. Over the […]
Trump believes he will never experience an accident, diagnosis, or any indignities related to age. He thinks his money will insulate him from chaos, from these eventualities. One is left to wonder how he will look back on his recent antics and regret them. The title says it all. Donald Trump’s book Crippled America: How […]
The smell of smoke from pot burns my chest, generates a ringing in my ears, brings back the oscillating sound of choppers, makes me cower with old fears: My father will be hauled off. Strange things come up around Thanksgiving. Last year, I had just moved in with my boyfriend the day before Thanksgiving. It […]
“If I were the kind of person who could believe, I would believe.” I have been an atheist—at first, secretly, from about age 12, and then openly from my mid-20s on—long enough to know that there will always be times when I wish I still had God. I feel the absence of faith most profoundly […]
Even in diverse neighborhoods and communities, children start expressing anti-black prejudice around the time they hit preschool age and these attitudes get progressively worse by their 10th birthday. Over the last several years, events from the killing of Trayvon Martin to the student uprisings at University of Missouri have shed an intense light on the issues […]
Most men have the luxury of knowing about the fact of rape, but not the reality of rape, and what it means in terms of day-to-day life for girls and women. A few months ago, TIME magazine editor Susanna Schrobsdorff wrote a terrific article about having to talk to a daughter about rape. In the wake […]
