1 The subject that afternoon, our teacher, Mr. Slater, told us, would be how to play chess. "Chess is about checkmate, about trapping your opponent’s king,” he said from the front of the classroom. “It isn't about taking pieces. Only mediocre
Morality and justice
An Anthology That Leaves the Best for Last
For Artificial Divide, (2021) Robert Kingett and Randy Lacey collected sixteen stories by visually impaired and blind authors. As I lament in my essay “Twilight of a Stockbroker” (2017), there is almost no fiction created by blind authors in which
Neely and Penny: What Do We Know?
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
Can We Talk, Please?
The only way we will stop being a nation torn apart is to find humility in ourselves. That word, “humility,” jumped out at me last Wednesday evening during a Zoom discussion held by my Amherst college classmates and Professor Austin Sarat. The topic
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 and Death
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