Category: Personal Essays
-
Moral Education
Moral Education By Cryn Johannsen Every Sunday when she was a little girl, she would go to a big Gothic church with her parents and her older, increasingly rebellious brother. With her hair covered in bows and her body clothed in neat little dresses – white ones in the summertime and purple ones in the…
-
What Color Is Terror?
Watching professional broadcast journalists attempt to compete with social media hobbyists for any nugget of information during last week’s manhunt for suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing, many us felt a familiar dread. We know, either intuitively, through direct experience or via professional training, that media have a collective power to help diffuse or fuel…
-
Terror, Torture, and Resistance
When I heard about the Boston Marathon bombings, I’d just finished reading Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel’s harrowing op-ed in the New York Times. Moqbel has been on hunger strike since February to protest his indefinite imprisonment, without trial, at the United States’ detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. According to the U.S. military, ninety-nine…
-
Our Chemical Romance
There are 85,000 synthetic chemicals in our midst, introduced into the environment since the Second World War. Over 216 everyday chemicals have proven correlations to breast cancer, and yet only 7% of the 3,000 in high production have been tested for detrimental effect. It is hard to comprehend a process where a blanket tsunami of…
-
Worlds Apart
It’s a complicated thing to shift base from where you have stayed all your life and move to a foreign country to start life over, anew and clueless. Except, I wasn’t really starting over when I moved to the United States in August, 2011. I couldn’t see it back then, as the excitement of independence…
-
Keeping the Hope Alive through Trauma
The following series of essays have been written while teaching ESL classes to adult students from all corners of the world (this writing exercise began in late January, and continues to be a part of my classes). Each morning, I required the first class – which was what inspired this project – to answer one…
-
Thinking Green
Massachus’ians are thinkers. There is scant shortage of intellectual pursuit in this state; Cambridge and Boston especially are visibly abuzz with the life of the mind, in all its variety of bloom. So it is all the more notable that the Northeastern CannaBusiness Symposium, held Saturday March 16th in downtown Boston by the National Cannabis…
-
The Freedom of Love
The following series of essays have been written while teaching ESL classes to adult students from all corners of the world (this writing exercise began last month, and continues to be a part of my classes). Each morning, the first class – that began this project – was required to answer one of two questions.…
-
Living Beyond Class
We are living in a time of seemingly impenetrable race and class division. I say “seemingly” because we have seen what may have been perceived to be impossible made possible in that a surplus of minorities have gained social and economic advancement because of pioneers in political and social activism. One such pioneer is Betsy…
-
Playing the Feminist Card
A cat token voted into the game of Monopoly is very cool—but Parker Bros. still got trumped, because the hottest deal in game design now is the newly minted Feminist Playing Cards. These decks are portable, playable art collections, encompassing both illustrative and musical adventures. A discussion of Missy Elliott’s efforts on behalf of strays,…