Terrorism

The Empty Room Inside Each of Us

Sun, 31 May 2026 15:00:00 -0400

Crumb is always right, always the one telling the story, always the one who turns the drab, lonesome plains they call home into a world that’s dramatic and necessary.

Lesson Plan

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:00:45 -0400

The Right and I agree on the potential of universities as a space in which students develop ideas that can transform the world. The difference is, they want to stamp it out, and I want to encourage it.

Sleeping Children

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0500

What was happening in and to Gaza was not really about democracy at all—or any kind of universal, God-given values. It was simply about power.

Timing

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0400

A broken clock, a chance encounter, a long-distance relationship

I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated

lm2534@hotmail.com — Sat, 31 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0400

If you walk the stations of the cross, most tour guides / will politely point out the spot where they think Jesus / may have fallen or the spot where / he may have met his mother.

Blind History

Sat, 31 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0400

China is racist. Russia is racist. The US is racist. . . . Africans need to bet on each other. The Black Diaspora and the Global South need to bet on and support each other.

A Thousand Words

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 04:00:00 -0400

A Thousand Words features photography so rich with narrative that it tells a story all on its own.

An Aspect Of Freedom

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 05:05:00 -0500

What is it about a traffic stop and a city block and a sidewalk and a country road and a Bible study and a choir room and a vestibule and a playground and a living room and a bedroom and a bed and a driveway and a highway and a stairwell and a gas station and a suburb and a driver’s seat and a parking lot and a balcony and the door to one’s own home.

The Exact Moment

Thu, 17 Dec 2020 17:00:00 -0500

When I first moved to New York City, I told myself that I could always leave if things didn’t work out. I’d be all in, until I wasn’t. I found a similar all-or-nothing quality to life there: the sad history of people’s failed dreams alongside all the obvious success stories and diehards who wondered what your problem was.

Beneath Our Feet

Wed, 01 Aug 2018 00:00:00 -0400

Well, if the world handed me strangeness, then I’d take whatever advantage I could, which meant walking right down the middle of a street usually clogged with traffic. There was luxury in the freedom to roam as I pleased.

Running In Guantánamo

Wed, 01 Jan 2014 00:00:00 -0500

I jog as far into this uncharted area as I can, toward the mouth of the river. A soldier emerges from some reeds, and then a dozen more. Guns are pointing at me. I have accidentally run into a squad on patrol in full gear.

Meat

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0500

My friend Tommy Crotty, who was a terrific basketball player in New York and went on to play college ball and be a cheerful husband and excellent dad before the idiot who just died in Abbottabad murdered him and thousands of people on September Eleventh, used to call every big guy he ever played with Meat.

Ramon Martinez Tells What Happened That Day

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0400

My name is Ramon. I am fifteen. One thing people don’t know about me is I saved one of the airplanes on September the eleven from hitting one of the towers. The south tower. No one knows this because I used my power to make everyone forget. There will be people who say I say it now to get credit for this paper due in school but that is not the reason, the reason is people should know what I can do so they don’t mess with me. People did mess with me before and that is how I develop my power. It is a strong power as you will hear now.

Seven Days: A Diary

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

We already know that our lives will not be as they were before September 11. When the World Trade Center towers collapsed, a deep, long crack appeared in the old reality. The muffled roar of everything that might burst out can be heard through the crack: violence, cruelty, fanaticism, and madness. The wish that we might keep what we have, keep up a daily schedule, suddenly seems exposed and vulnerable. The effort to maintain some sort of routine — to keep family, home, friends together — now seems so touching, even heroic.

The Jar Of Coins

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

The cold glass jar felt good in my pudgy seven-year-old hands. It had once been filled with hard candies wrapped in brightly colored cellophane, a gift from one of my dad’s clients. Sitting on our back deck on a Colorado summer afternoon, I wondered what I should fill the jar with now that all the candy was gone.

Land Of The Free?

Sun, 01 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Really, unless you’re from one of the targeted immigrant communities, you have no idea what’s going on there. Streets are empty. Stores and businesses are closed because people have been detained or deported, or their customers have disappeared, or residents are just afraid to go out. These used to be bustling, vibrant neighborhoods, but if you don’t live there or have reason to visit, you would never know the impact homeland-security policies have had. In the two months following September 11, more than twelve hundred Muslim, Arab, and South Asian men were rounded up for indefinite detention. Then, starting in September 2002, there was “special registration,” where noncitizen males from Islamic countries were required to register with the INS.

Sunbeams

Tue, 01 May 2007 16:48:00 -0400

What the people want is very simple. They want an America as good as its promise.

Barbara Jordan

Mission Accomplished

Tue, 01 May 2007 00:01:00 -0400

I’ve become obsessed with George W. Bush. I spend hours Googling “George W. Bush low IQ” (500,000 hits), “George W. Bush stubborn asshole” (67,000 hits), and “George W. Bush deranged maniac” (43,000 hits). I loathe this man with an intensity that makes my stomach hurt. Why he wasn’t thrown out of office long ago baffles me.

I Was A Guantánamo Prisoner

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 00:05:00 -0500

I walked slowly up Mill Hill Road in Woodstock, New York. A rope tied my feet together; another bound my hands. A third rope, around my waist, was attached to the woman in front of me. A black hood covered my face. The rest of my wardrobe was an orange jumpsuit, like the ones worn by prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.

Golden

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 00:04:00 -0500

Seduced By War

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500

In retrospect we can see that the Gulf War wasn’t the triumph it seemed to be at the time. In a tactical sense, we succeeded in ejecting Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait, and we did it with great speed and remarkably modest casualties on our side. But in the long run all we really did was wade deeper into a political morass that we don’t understand. After the war, the decision was made to maintain U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia. And, because we didn’t remove Saddam Hussein from power, we ended up with a policy of military containment that had us imposing sanctions on Iraq — with horrific results for the Iraqi people — and bombing the country on a weekly, if not daily, basis, beginning in 1998. So we went tripping blindly down the path to September 11, 2001. The Gulf War was a pivotal event leading to this mess we call the “global war on terror.”

The War Within Islam

Fri, 01 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500

We’ve made it easier for jihadist propagandists to convince the Muslim world that this is a war against Islamic values. . . . You want to know why we’re losing the war on terror? Because they have the better marketing campaign.

In God’s Name

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0500

In the past Muslims understood that the message of Islam is contained in very specific teachings, and that other teachings in the Koran are very Arabian in character. Unfortunately, some present-day Muslims — and they are properly called “fundamentalists” — do not look at the historical context of the Koran’s teachings, and so they want to transplant those Arabian teachings exactly as they are into twenty-first-century society.

A More Perfect Union

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 00:00:00 -0500

I think it’s helpful to remind white ethnics that they, too, came here in boats; that they, too, lived in slums; that they, too, had yellow fever; that they, too, were stigmatized as incorrigible; that they, too, had the highest homicide rates and the highest incarceration rates and the highest rates of mental illness; and that everything that was said about them in those days is now being said about Salvadorans, Dominicans, African Americans, Mexicans, Vietnamese, and Cambodians in our inner cities.

Looking Like Osama And Other Confessions

Tue, 01 Mar 2005 00:10:00 -0500

Some lucky people look like Brad Pitt or Sarah Jessica Parker. It is my fate to resemble Osama bin Laden.

Dispatches From The Occupied Territories

Tue, 01 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, cofounder of the Palestinian militant organization Hamas, was assassinated on Monday by the Israeli military.

This Was My Home

Tue, 01 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Sunbeams

Tue, 01 Feb 2005 13:00:00 -0500

It’s true that I’ve driven through a number of red lights. But on the other hand, I’ve stopped at a lot of green ones I’ve never gotten credit for.

Glenn Gould

Sitting In The Fire

Sat, 01 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500

The first noble truth of the Buddha is that people experience dukka, a feeling of dissatisfaction or suffering, a feeling that something is wrong. . . . only in the West is this dissatisfaction articulated as “Something is wrong with me.”

December 2004

Wed, 01 Dec 2004 00:00:00 -0500

Democracy didn’t leave behind a forwarding address. Who can blame her? Maybe she just got tired of being ignored, and lied to, and slapped around.