• General Nonfiction

    “Are You Somebody?” Lamentations of An Irish Woman Memoirist

    July 23, 2017 - By 

    How does one write gorgeous, lyrical, haunting prose about topics that reach to the very depths of human sadness? About the deep grinding poverty of mid-20th century Ireland, land of no birth control and females as baby-producing machines. About loss and longing, the physical and emotional battering of children, the abuse and oppression of women, the ache of adult loneliness, the vacancy of wanton sex, the invisibility wrought by old age. About the alcohol and drugs to which so many victims of the above desperately flee. And about the lifelong search for love, identity and self-acceptance that proves so elusive in the wake…

  • Politics/Culture - Religion

    Is Health Care a Human Right? Or Is That the Wrong Question?

    July 15, 2017 - By 

    The intense debate about the Affordable Care Act and the “repeal-and-replace” effort currently underway in Congress by the Republican Party majority harbors an elemental question at its foundation: Is health care a human right? Generally speaking, I think it safe to say Democrats would answer yes to that question, Republicans no. It’s a stark dividing line across which scores of different philosophical arguments and assumptions have been proffered by equally passionate advocates on either side. But I think it is fundamentally the wrong question, and I will try to wrestle down the reasons why in the rest of this post.…

  • Poetry - Poetry by Andrew Hidas

    Crow, Unlucky

    July 11, 2017 - By 

      CROW, UNLUCKY By Andrew Hidas What were the odds of it being this crow in particular and not one of its hundreds of brethren now squawking futilely on its behalf as its hapless, now limp carcass is being carried furious and fast across the lawns of Jacqueline Drive, hard in the talons of this hawk who passes within yards of my bicycle as the victim’s fellow crows dive bomb every determined flap of its wings? Every crow spared but this one, dead, snuffed, just like that, a meal in the waiting if the hawk can elude the battalion of…

  • General Nonfiction - Politics/Culture

    Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me”: A Meditation

    July 3, 2017 - By 

    Every person, country, and culture carries a wound. For all its wonder and joys-a-waiting, life leaves virtually everyone bruised and torn by some deep hurt, some natural catastrophe, personal betrayal, shattered dream or misguided intention that leaves us chastened, sobered, aware not only of our intense vulnerability to being hurt, but also our own capacity to fail others and cause pain in return. We are born into a broken world, a stark fact that every religion this side of the most happy-talking prosperity gospel has affirmed throughout history. America’s deep, still festering wound is slavery and the institutionalized, abiding racism…