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Browse Topics
Oppression
Readers Write
Small Victories
Delivering a calf, surviving a rape, arm-wrestling like a girl
April 2005
The Sun Interview
Leap Of Faith
Yossi Klein Halevi’s Quest For Reconciliation In the Holy Land
On one level mystics and pluralists from different faiths have more in common with each other than they do with fundamentalists of their own religion. Sometimes I feel like I belong to two peoples: the Jewish people and a pluralistic people drawn from all faiths.
March 2005
Fiction
Where You Could End Up
I’ve been staying with my friend Jackson, and I’m wearing his large red flannel jacket with the blue padding inside. I hope he lets me keep it. It’s a comfortable jacket, and I’d freeze otherwise. The wind is blowing. In Chicago in the winter, the wind chill is the only measurement that matters. I wish Maria would get here before the cold sinks into me permanently.
February 2004
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Heat
The heat that summer was a living thing that tangled around you, tripping you, slowing you to a crawl. New York City was draped in an impressionist haze. It was 1957. I was thirteen and had my first job, stapling tags onto winter clothes in the warehouse of a department store.
January 2004
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Allies
I should have listened to my intuition about that job. When I got my PhD in 1995, I was one of only two people from my program who landed professional positions; the other woman was going to teach a heavy load at a state college. I had been offered an endowed chair at a prestigious Baptist college in Georgia.
January 2004
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
A Place To Stand
It was no surprise that the judge had given me the harshest sentence allowed by law. The nuns had always said I was a bad boy, and here was the judge making the same condemnation. I was sure I was convicted mostly because of who I was, expunged from a society that didn’t want people like me in it.
December 2002
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Where The Rain Belongs
After three nights at the Broadway Motel out on the highway ($12.95 a night, color TV), seven nights in a forty-dollar-a-week First Street flophouse with free running roaches and dying winos, and two rumpled and freezing nights listening to the rain clatter against the roof of my car, I took to the streets of Eureka, California, on foot in search of an apartment and a job.
June 2002
The Sun Interview
Truth In Advertising
Breaking The Spell Of Consumerism — An Interview With Kalle Lasn
Yes, ads are everywhere: on billboards and buildings, buses and cars. You fill your car with gas, and there’s an ad on the nozzle. There are ads on bank machines. Kids watch Pepsi and Snickers ads in classrooms and tattoo their calves with Nike swooshes. Administrators in Texas have plans to sell ad space on the roofs of their schools. There are ads on bananas at the supermarket. In San Francisco, IBM beamed its logo onto clouds with a laser; it was visible for ten miles. In the United Kingdom, Boy Scouts sell ad space on their merit badges. In Australia, Coca-Cola cut a deal with the postal service to cancel stamps with a Coke advertisement. There are ads at eye level above urinals. There’s really nowhere to hide. And adspeak — the language of the ad — means nothing. Worse, it’s an antilanguage that annihilates truth and meaning wherever the two come in contact.
July 2001Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Slave Chair
On a spring day in 1958, I circled the table in my grandmother’s dining room, trying to figure out one of her “test tables.” The test-table challenge worked like this: My grandmother set a formal table, purposely committing an array of errors so subtle even Emily Post couldn’t spot them — turning a knife blade in the wrong direction, placing an iced-tea spoon where a soup spoon should be. My job was to do what Emily Post could not.
February 2001The Sun Interview
Crimes Of Punishment
An Interview With Christian Parenti
I describe SWAT teams in Fresno as a kind of postmodern public execution — a highly ritualized, highly theatrical display of the sovereign’s power. Like an invading army, they occupy whole neighborhoods, harass the residents, and surround the houses. They have machine guns, barking dogs, and armored personnel carriers. This is state propaganda, political theater, directed not at the “perp” holed up in the house, but at the hundreds of community members watching.
October 2000
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