Journalist – Historian – Speaker
Yesterday, I had my first piece published on the Huffington Post. It’s about my daughter’s backpack. The boy came down the hall just as I was arriving at preschool with my daughter, Ellie. In a voice filled with excitement, she said, “Michael [not his real name], come look at my new backpack! It’s the Avengers!” Indeed …
It’s been quite a week. Since the publication of my Al Jazeera America piece on the cult of compliance, I’ve done a bunch of press, written a few new essays, prepped for the start of classes (tomorrow!), and pitched some long-term projects. More news on that when there’s news. I was so swarmed with topics …
The apartheid government of South Africa had a problem (well, it had a lot of them, but bear with me). It wanted to discriminate by race, but how does one deal with mixed-race people? It came up with the infamous “pencil test,” in which a pencil is pushed through a person’s hair, and how easily …
At about 9:30 AM yesterday I got a series of texts from my babysitter. She had been tidying toys with my daughter in one of the rooms, and suddenly Nico, my son, was gone. She and Ellie searched the house, looked outside, and gradually panicked. They called the cops. They ran around. They shouted. They …
Today St. Louis police shot a man with a knife. He had been acting erratically, police showed up, he raised the knife and said shoot me now, so they did. Read more about it here. The officers ordered the man to get down, according to Dotson. The man, 23, became more agitated and walked toward …
[Content Note: Ableist Speech including use of the “r-word.” Later, I quote a passage from Huckleberry Finn that contains the n-word, not spelled out.] This post works with a 1996 piece from David Sedaris and This American Life that contains terrible depictions of the intellectually disabled. It was re-broadcast in 2013. I’d like to see content notes …
My first piece for Al Jazeera America is a big one: The Cult of Compliance. As regular readers know, I have been talking this for a long time and thinking about police violence in various ways for even longer. I used the phrase for the first time on this post from August 17, 2013. The …
I had three essays published in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week, 2 planned (they normally won’t post on the same day) and one a reaction piece. I’m exceptionally proud of my university’s work on undocumented students, and in general of the way that many Catholic universities have responded to this issue. Making decisions about …
Last week I wrote the story of our son’s diagnosis with Down syndrome. Lots of people read it, for which I am grateful. There’s another story here, though, and one that might matter even more than ours – the stories of our friends who supported us. Each of us is more likely to confront a situation …
Nancy McCrea Iannone argues that the new Louisiana law on pre-natal testing inserts abortion politics into what had been a non-partisan movement by forbidding health-care providers to present termination as a neutral or acceptable choice. Comments from David Perry on this post can be found here. Pro-Life, Pro-Choice, Pro-Information: Proceed with Caution by Nancy McCrea Iannone. …