Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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The Business of Fancy Dancing by Sherman Alexie: A Movie Review
“I’ve had sex with one Indian woman, 112 white boys, sixteen Black men, seven Asian men, three dudes of ambiguous ethnic identity, one really homely guy, and zero Native American men.” — Seymour Polatkin, poet. I just finished watching “The Business of Fancy Dancing” again and I feel as if this is one of the…
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Abby DeRigo Named Executive Director of the Homeless Empowerment Project and Spare Change News
The board of the Homeless Empowerment Project and Spare Change News has chosen Abby DeRigo, a recent graduate of Suffolk University, to lead the organization as it adapts to the conditions of the coronavirus pandemic and moves forward into the new normal. “The pandemic obviously changed everything that I had been thinking about. Now things…
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The Changes Come So Fast
My wife, Mary Esther, and I celebrated our wedding anniversary on June 22. We were married in 2002 and the time has just whipped by. So many different things have happened; it’s all good but sometimes there are hard surprises. Mary Esther has scoliosis, stenosis and various other things wrong with her spine. She had…
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With Spare Change News closed, a local fund awards one SCN vendor-writer a way to pay rent
Governor Baker’s March 23 emergency order for all non-essential businesses to close impacted Spare Change News and its vendors like myself significantly. Spare Change News closed its doors for 11 weeks and reopened Friday, June 12. Over the past three months, I sold older back issues to the public in my Coolidge Corner, Brookline spot.…
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Covid-19 and cages on Boston’s Methadone Mile
Just before all hell broke loose in Minnesota and Kentucky, I happened upon a story shared by a friend and done by Turtle Boy Daily News that said homeless people on Methadone Mile were being locked into a cage. I saw the pictures, but I still couldn’t believe it. Even knowing that I was at…
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Stolen Lives
“For George Floyd: The Whole World was Watching”* Shawn Mottram, killed dead on October 12, 1998 by what Trooper Joseph Stone said was an accidental shot when he slipped while climbing a chain link fence with gun in hand. A kill shot. Stone shoots so well by accident that he can split a bullet in…
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Taking The Homeless Census by Alexis Ivy: A Book Review
I read this marvelous book of poetry three times upon receiving it. It’s no wonder to me that her Crown of Sonnets named “The A-Street Shelter: A Crown of Sonnets” won the 2018 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship In Poetry prize. “Taking The Homeless Census” brings the reader into the world of homelessness with a jolt.…
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A New Normal
In a recent ad by Joe Kennedy, who’s running for one of the U.S. Senate seats in Massachusetts, he talks about how now there’s “talk to go back to normal. Our normal was broken.” As far as political ads go, it’s effective. I began to think: exactly what was normal, and what the heck is…
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Cambridge Nonprofit Coalition: Bringing communities together, one organization at a time
In the nonprofit ecosystem, many organizations feature equity and justice among their core goals, and in 2013, a few Cambridge-based non-profit organizations decided to come together to coordinate and increase support for each other’s work. The result of these meetings became the Cambridge Nonprofit Coalition (CNC), said Darrin Korte, chair of CNC’s Membership and Governance…
Got any book recommendations?