The other day, a friend was sitting in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park with a friend when a friend of the friend appeared. Somehow a recent incident came up. On May 1, a 24-year-old, white ex-marine named Daniel Penny put a thirty-year-old black man named
What Is It With the Apocalypse?
Why do I have such a visceral aversion for dystopian fantasy and apocalyptic fiction? After a friend convinced me to read Ling Ma’s Severance (2018), a debut novel that has lately garnered a lot of renewed attention, the reasons for my resistance
To Complain or Not to Complain: Ten Considerations
When do we choose to let bygones be bygones? How do we decide when to let go and when to pursue? I’m unhappy with one of the lawyers who handled my father’s estate. In deciding how to proceed, I was aided by conversations with several friends and
Fairness in Love
On April 12, the Washington Post published a questionnaire designed to show readers if they hold ableist assumptions. However, the questions reveal their authors’ own prejudices about matters of love and death. Throughout, for reasons explained in
Sunlight at Amherst?
I finally have the basic answer to the question I posed to my alma mater, Amherst College, nearly two years ago. Subscribers to this website may recall that, after being excluded from a Zoom presentation in 2021 due to the College’s reliance on an
Big Eyes
I resist the notion of “ableism” because it suggests that all nondisabled people (whoever they may be) discriminate against disabled people, which isn’t true. However, a visually impaired friend of mine, his sighted wife and sighted six-year-old