recent posts
- Channeling Collective Fury into Fat Justice Is the Transformational Power We Need: Part 2
- Channeling Collective Fury into Fat Justice Is the Transformational Power We Need: Part 1
- Our Dizzying, Repeating Cycles of Cultural Amnesia Around Sex Ed: Part 2
- Our Dizzying, Repeating Cycles of Cultural Amnesia Around Sex Ed: Part 1
- We’ll Be Hiding from the Rainfall for These Beacon Beach Reads
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Category: American Society
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by Kay Trimberger Singles during the Thanksgiving and Christmas/Hanukkah seasons—quintessential family holidays in the U.S.—are stereotyped as lonely, isolated and pathetic. While popular entertainment is now as likely to depict family conflict as well as joy during the holidays, we have noticeably fewer images for singles. Contrary to stereotypes, my study of long-term, middle-aged single…
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Mark Winne, author of Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty, will be participating in a live chat about the shortcomings of our food bank system today at 1PM ET on the Washington Post website. The discussion is related to his opinion piece from yesterday’s WaPo about the problems of…
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by Aidan Delgado I still think of Veterans Day as Armistice Day, its original name, commemorating the end of World War I. The nations that founded the holiday did so to celebrate the end of what they believed was the "war to end all wars" and thus to symbolize the end of war itself. In…
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by Helen Benedict Over this past year, I have talked to forty or so women soldiers for my forthcoming book, The Lonely Soldier: Women at War in Iraq, and it has become clear to me that they have a set of needs quite different from those of men. All soldiers must deal with the roadside…
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Penny Coleman, the author of Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide, and the Lessons of War and Village Elders, lives with her family in New York City. For more information, visit her website at www.flashbackhome.com. On November 6, the Joshua Omvig Suicide Prevention Bill became law. The bill was named for a 22-year-old Iowa reservist who…
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Repeated and long deployments, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and traumatic brain injuries are contributing to high rates of homelessness among veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. The numbers are disturbingly high for a war that’s still being waged: Some advocates say the early presence of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan at shelters does not bode…
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by Marcus Eriksen Veterans Day seems pointless, just a bunch of old vets telling war stories. There is no Hallmark set of instructions to hint to a gift you might submit to your favorite war hero. It’s partly a recycled holiday due to another, Armistice Day, rendered obsolete by time. But to this veteran it…
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David Dow, the author of Executed on a Technicality: Lethal Injustice on America’s Death Row, is a professor at the University of Houston Law Center. He is also the founder and director of the Texas Innocence Network (TIN), which helps inmates, including many convicted of capital crimes in a state where the death penalty is…
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This week, we’ve been thinking about families, and in particular relationships between generations. Today, Clare Dunsford talks about the specific challenges and rewards of raising a child with special needs and his own special way of looking at the world. by Clare Dunsford “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I ask…
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Jonathan Silin wrote My Father’s Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents to chronicle his experiences learning to care for his elderly parents when their independence began to slip away. Although his years of intimate daily contact with his parents ended with their deaths, his relationship with and understanding of them…
Beacon Broadside 