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Sunbeams

Laws, it is said, are for protection of the people. It’s unfortunate that there are no statistics on the number of lives that are clobbered yearly as a result of laws: outmoded laws; laws that found their way onto the books as a result of ignorance, hysteria, or political haymaking; antilife laws; biased laws; laws that pretend that reality is fixed and nature is definable. . . . A survey such as that could keep a dozen dull sociologists out of mischief for months.

Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

The Practice Of Touch

I imagine my own daughter in Danny’s situation. She is a toddler, so I would be allowed to stay with her if she got COVID. But if she were older, what would I do? What rules would I break to sit beside her?

When Living Is A Protest

My work is an attempt to show what it means to live in the struggle in places like South Carolina and Mississippi, and to document protests from Ferguson, Missouri, to New York City. I want to show the faces of those whose lives are spent in protest.

Even Money

Dietrich Vollrath On Repairing America’s Economic Inequality

I think the pandemic is changing people’s idea of what the government should and could do. It’s definitely made them frustrated with what it can’t do.

One Of Us

Mark W. Moffett On The Social Behavior Of Humans And Other Animals

It’s important to compare things that are pretty alike, like humans and chimps, with their evolutionary ties, but when you find similarities between things that are ordinarily seen as very different, like humans and ants — that’s where the new ideas come from.

100 Dollars

Are you thirsty? Do you like to drink water? Are you from a generation that thinks it’s OK to drink water out of single-use plastic bottles? Then the world works for you!

Blind Hate

Randy Blazak On Why White Supremacy Persists

Generation Z, my daughter’s generation, is the most racially mixed and most diverse, and they are the worst nightmare of the old white supremacists.

Racing Toward The Future

[History] rushes on, as it always did, with two forces racing toward the future, one splendidly uniformed, the other ragged but inspired.