“The Final Act”
The Final Act | Common Reader: Faces & Places by Donato DiCamillo
Dispatches
I Say A Little Prayer
As a survivor of sexual abuse which took part during my high school years, I have dreaded and awaited this Thursday as soon as I knew September 27 would be the day Dr. Christine Blasey Ford would testify. I had just turned 13 years old in October 1991…
Rocket Men
NPR ran a story this week on a new “space mining” program at the Colorado School of Mines, which turned out to be misleading. In reality, it is “The first program in the world focused on educating scientists, engineers, economists, entrepreneurs, and policy makers in the developing…
Vegan Comfort Food
Reine Bayoc of SweetArt Bakeshop & Cafe (Credit: Lawrence Bryant, LB Photography) Reine Bayoc is a force of baking-and-cooking-from-scratch badassery and an original force of plant-based comfort food that is authentically Southern (and the #ChurchPicnicPlate hashtag is all hers). The woman whose roots began in McKenzie, Tennessee before she came…
If We Had Money
A parlor game for those with more pallor than parlor: What would we do if we had no debts, no deadlines, nowhere we had to be? (No restrictions at all is so silly it shatters the fantasy; there are no games without rules.) The dollar amounts are not so large,…
Big Fat Lies
This week Michael Hobbes’ September 19 investigative feature for the Huffington Post resonated with a lot of readers. So what did Hobbes’ report on for a piece that has garnered collective sighs and tears of relief, nods of understanding and recognition, defensiveness and ire from some medical professionals, head-shaking affirmation…
On Not Knowing
You know that old joke about English majors: “They don’t know anything, but they know where to go to find things out.” I resemble that remark. And as a former English major and common reader, I see that learned skill as one of the glories of what we tremble to…
Tim Burton’s Apple Orchard
This past weekend I went apple-picking in Marine, Illinois, with my husband, 1-year-old daughter, and best friend Nicole. Marine is a lovely little village of 960 souls first settled by a sea captain and his sailor friends in the late 19th…
A Way You Will Never Be: “Star Wars” Edition
“This all kind of started because of a sarcastic comment that Peggy made on Facebook last fall,” Greg says of his wife, a privacy attorney with her own firm in Atlanta. “Someone had just gotten a Jawa costume approved by the Georgia Garrison of the 501st, and…
What is Provided, What is Taken
Communities provide and take away, two forms of power that reinforce and balance each other until they do not. Bigger communities, such as cities, states, or nations, provide opportunities to earn a living; infrastructure such as roads to get to work and the store; and mutual aid—firefighters save our homes…