My most formidable years were spent watching The Simpsons, reading Archie comics and playing video games. Some of the most valuable lessons I was taught…
click here to download Climate change is a big, scary topic. It’s not always easy to talk about and it can be almost impossible to convince…
Mat Johnson writes “I grew up a black boy who looked white. This was in a predominantly African-American neighborhood
One of the more beautiful graphic novels I’ve read is Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli (2009). The story follows Asterios, a self-centered “paper architect” (his designs…
It’s not that Joe Sacco is the first comics artist, a sequentialist if you’ll allow, to produce stories different from the bread and butter of…
“The structures of society need to be transformed, but the hidden motivations and assumptions on which the structures rest need to be transformed as well.”…
On June 20th the Dalai Lama came to the London School of Economics to give a talk titled ‘Resisting Intolerance: an ethical and global challenge‘….
What makes a neighborhood an awesome place to live? Is it proximity to cool coffee shops? Or to lovely public parks? While those are beautiful…
Great things have been claimed for the Olympics. Superlative things. They will be the ‘regeneration’ games, transforming East London, considered one of the poorest areas…
Just south of London’s financial district, on the other side of the Thames River stands the Heygate estate, a mammoth public housing block that once…
My son Nelson has been studying at the Univerisdad Complutense, the largest public university in Spain with 75,000 students. He has been in Madrid since…
As an LA native I would have never imagined that a bike movement would ever flourish in this city. Not because it’s impossible, but because…
In December of 2011, for the fifth time in its history, the pro football team the Green Bay Packers sold stock in the team. They…
While Chicago hosts the NATO summit, where military leaders and their like-minded political counterparts turned conference rooms into war rooms and exhibit halls into transatlantic…
I am too far from Tucson now, thousands of miles away, but this place where I grew up is so deeply in my heart I…
In 1990, I organized a grassroots coalition against redlining and for community reinvestment. It was led mostly by women of color and a few very exceptional…
These reflections have been nourished by Angela Davis’s totally badass autobiography
When I’m on a panel about writing mysteries, I’ll mention that any student or fan of the genre should read the Maltese Falcon by Samuel Dashiell Hammett