Well, this is something that doesn’t happen every day! My brother had a “small planet” (asteroid) named after him! (I know I’m not supposed to overuse exclamation points, but I can’t help it.) He earned this through his work on the New Horizons project—a NASA mission to study the dwarf planet Pluto, its moons, and […]
How Concerned White Citizens Marched in Selma Before Bloody Sunday A small thing made all of human civilization possible. It is often overlooked and undervalued, but it is so much a part of our lives that we don’t pay much attention to it. We did it even before we developed language, and we still do […]
Today we’re traveling to meet T.K. Thorne! T.K. Thorne wanted to make first contact with aliens. When that didn’t work out, she became a police officer. Although most people she met were human, some were quite strange…. Retiring as a precinct captain, she writes full-time. Her books include two award-winning historical novels (Noah’s Wife and Angels […]
This is the time of year to wish peace on Earth, a goal and prayer that seems always before us, and “When will we ever learn?” echoes in our minds. But what if you had a magical chance to change things….? I pondered this question many years ago and was recently asked it again […]
I just read an article about the importance of connecting or reconnecting with our playful selves. “It offers a reprieve from the chaos.” That sounded intriguing. There is certainly a lot of chaos going on at the moment. I could use a reprieve. When we were children, we didn’t play to accomplish anything. We just […]
Covid-19 changed us. Our grandchildren, or those who were very young during it, might forget all about it by the time they are grown, as most of my generation has little knowledge of the 1918 flu pandemic and the fact that President Woodrow Wilson tried to suppress news of that devastating because he thought it […]
Who knew? The women’s movement to win the vote in the United States (which didn’t happen until 1920) began with book clubs! In my life, “feminism” was a word often expressed with a sneer, the struggle for equality seen as an effort to shed femininity and be man-like. Burn your bra at the peril of […]
We are perplexing beings. I just finished reading Maus, a graphic book by Art Spiegelman banned in Russia and Tennessee. The author’s words and drawings depict his attempt to capture his father’s memories of living through the Holocaust. The young man is conflicted, unable to stand being around his eccentric, obsessive father and overwhelmed by […]
What kind of world allows young American football players to feel comfortable making a video about raping an unconscious girl? A world where the defense against a brutal, fatal rape of a student in India is that “respectable women are not raped?” A world where a young Pakistani student is shot for going to school? The […]