My kids—particularly my daughter—are currently obsessed with Aladdin. Not the 2019 remake, but the 90s version in all its animated glory. So, as you might imagine, I’ve got the songs and the script coursing through my head on repeat. I found myself hearing Aladdin’s voice in my head this last week, oddly enough in relation…
You couldn’t buy one anywhere. Of all the crazy, world-altering details that I remember from that horrible day 18 years ago, it was that every store had sold out of American flags. No matter who you were or who you voted for, or what you looked like—that was our rallying cry. Everyone was flying a…
Imagine the power of something thousands and thousands of times greater than the force of a nuclear bomb; a blast heard ‘round the world and reverberating across endless miles of ocean. Something that size seems almost incomprehensible, but it happened—courtesy of a small, seemingly insignificant dot in what is now Indonesia. In 535 AD, that…
I’ll never fully understand it. Despite the robust, centuries-long (let’s be real, millennia-long) custom of slavery on every continent of this planet of all languages, cultures, skin colors, races, religions, and everything in between—somehow the United States and its comparatively short-lived and comparatively tiny* foray into slavery always ends up as the scapegoat. We alone…
Oh, how many hours we spent filling out paperwork; checking and double checking to ensure we didn’t miss a thing. The fees we paid. The months we spent apart. The months my husband’s job waited for him while the US government finally got around to issuing a work permit. The hours we waited, stuck in…
As is the case most mornings, we had the morning news on in the background as we got ready for work and daycare. At one point, Lawrence Jones came on the screen with the rest of the Fox & Friends crew. Observing that he looked a little different than Steve, Brian, and Ainsley (i.e. he’s…
There’s a viral video that surfaced recently of a hockey coach having a chat with the team before a game. He tells the players that if they planned to use hockey as a platform to protest our country or Canada (as other sports have done), they could see themselves out. Or rather, as he put…
I saw a back and forth the other day about singer Halsey’s looks, after she appeared on the covered of Rolling Stone magazine looking quite a bit less, ehem, “white” than people are used to seeing. Some assumed the singer had gotten a tan and a wig in what they called “cultural appropriation at its…
At 32 weeks pregnant with her daughter, my cousin’s vision suddenly began cutting out. As she stood trying to do her job as a pharmacy tech, confusion set in. She couldn’t count by fives, her ability to do simple tasks began to fade—and the pharmacist on staff believed (correctly) that she was in some kind…
I remember the feeling like it was yesterday. My (probably acne-covered) 9th grade face was hot and flushed as I listened to two of my school’s most popular girls accuse me of doing something I hadn’t done. I tried to hold back tears as I stuttered and stammered, grasping for words to rebut this completely…
A Future Free 