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The grief I carry isn’t just personal; it has been shaped by years of sitting with survivors of this kind of trauma. When we dismiss their warnings, telling ourselves it can’t happen here, we fall into the very delusion that…
I’ve been teaching the Holocaust for the better part of my career at university and beyond. It seems to me that in all of the chaos of this Trump administration, their most consistent policy thus far, maybe even their single…
When I look at the reactions of us Germans to the Hamas massacre, I think I recognize a repetition of the structure so familiar to me from the process of coming to terms with the Nazi era. Feelings are not…
It seems possible that this dulling may contribute to my current state of political fecklessness: while before I felt able to fight, now, with the situation seeming so much worse than in 2016, there are times I wish it would…
Roy Cohn brought his style of aggressive attacks to our campus. I too often saw him, an unattractive, thin man, agitated and angry, standing on a platform, holding a megaphone, giving speeches to my fellow students in the quad, yelling…
… While the Declaration cannot tell us how to respond to tyranny in our time, it can perhaps encourage us as the actions of the Trump administration become ever more lawless and the danger in the nation mounts.
I realize now that I am composed of the full inventory of the slights and dehumanizing aspects of racism I have known. But why did this story return so suddenly? Was it because many people were talking about racism and…
Matt was crazy, or that’s what some people said. Once, in the midst of a panicked and angry moment, he sat down right in the middle of Braddock Avenue and refused to move. Drivers honked in confusion and yelled out…
For 27 years it has been a local tradition. It is our little Sturgis. The town becomes unrecognizable but in a way that feels like the “rebellious, no rules, party of the century is here to stay” feeling. … And…
What I found particularly powerful was the sense of empowerment AI creation gave me. Suddenly, I could produce sophisticated visual art, compose music, or generate text that previously would have required years of technical training. This empowerment had a liberating…
For me, the art of being an analyst involves the art of writing—the two are inseparable, each opens the door to the other. Writing is like dreaming in that it is a medium in which I think and talk to…
We allow the future to come at us in tiny doses. Do we want to follow the news? Can we hold on to our internal compasses? Will they spin out of control? Is it even possible to set a course?…
I’m in my own process of trying to find my way through this. My earlier attempts at activism were hampered by how I related to my own identity, which went something like this: I’m here as a white person to…
We are safe until we are not. We are never free of the fate of others–our kids in particular. Doomscrolling on the sidelines is not a solution in the slightest. I also know fatalism is not acceptable. Apathy is worse,…
We are safe until we are not. We are never free of the fate of others–our kids in particular. Doomscrolling on the sidelines is not a solution in the slightest. I also know fatalism is not acceptable. Apathy is worse,…
The screen reflected back not just environmental catastrophe but my own complicity in the systems that perpetuate it. My car keys sat heavy in my pocket. The plastic water bottle on my desk suddenly felt like an accusation. In that…
Having ambition and drive is the usual thing to have in Aleppo. My name is Ammar and I am part of this culture.
It’s when you leave your inner self and move into the unknown; it’s when you are forced to flee from your awareness, from your assets, from yourself, to move as a physical creature and start to find any place or…
I have not had the luxury to mourn fully, to scream, to collapse under the weight of it all. Every time I feel the pull to surrender, to collapse under the immense weight of my grief and exhaustion, I remind…
This collapse of the boundary between inside and outside, which induces in the spectator a sense of profound spatial disorientation, is paradigmatic of the collapse of the parameters that sustain a basic sense of reality in experiences of catastrophe. In…
