Archive
My Mother, Stopped for Driving While Black
When the police pulled their guns on my mother, I reached for my phone and told her to be calm and do as they say. My parents and I had just been swarmed by police cars, sirens blaring, as we drove on I-64 through Virginia. Shock and fear consumed my family as we came...
The Sacrifice Muslim Soldier Khan Shouldn’t Have Had To Make
It was impossible not to be moved as Khizr and Ghazala Khan, two Muslim immigrants from Pakistan, stood before the Democratic National Convention and mourned their son Humayan, a U.S. soldier who'd been killed in Iraq. Humayan, his grieving father recalled, was "the...
My Food Identity Dilemma
Why do we eat what we eat? Many of us eat foods that are familiar, convenient, and that simply taste good, without thinking much about why we make the choices we do. For others — myself included — there's a constant struggle to determine what's healthy, both for...
Is Solar Energy Really Too Expensive?
In order for solar power to compete with other forms of energy, the conventional thinking goes, it needs to become way cheaper. Installing rooftop solar panels can be prohibitively expensive, after all, and it takes years before the resulting energy savings pay off....
The Disney-fication of Our National Parks
It’s summer vacation time and gasoline is quasi-cheap. So why not pile the family into the mini-van and pay a visit to the historic Budweiser Statue of Liberty, or motor out west in your Camry to Toyota’s Yellowstone National Park? That's right, our thoroughly...
Trump’s Bunker
In OtherWords: July 27, 2016
It's officially general election season now that the two major parties have nominated their candidates for the 2016 presidential race. This week in OtherWords, our tax expert Josh Hoxie digs into the Republican convention and finds... not much to talk about. But taken...
Trump’s Trickle-Down Ticket
It was easy to get caught up in the circus that was the Republican National Convention. Rousing speeches (plagiarized and original) and raucous floor votes make for great television and funny internet memes. Unfortunately, as we’ve come to expect from events organized...
It Doesn’t Have to Be ‘Us’ vs. ‘Them’
It's increasingly easy to believe that our country is irreconcilably divided. But that's not quite the America that Michael Morrill saw from his perch in Reading, Pennsylvania the weekend before the Republican convention in Cleveland. Morrill, the executive director...
There’s No Such Thing as a ‘Free Market’
The debates leading up to the election this year will no doubt invoke the "American value" of capitalism. But what, exactly, does that mean? And what should it mean? I'm no economist, but I took a few economics courses while earning an undergraduate business degree....
