Category: articles
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Sloppy Grows
Cluttered stalls line the market streets And merchants lift up their offerings with both hands Knowing they have the public in their palms. What used to be shunned as a practice of the unrefined – Now exalted as the height of morality and health. All those hours spent in brightly lit bulk warehouses Are now…
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Pomegranate Wine
I arrived in New Orleans’s muggy dawn haze to see a team of men spraying last night’s vomit into the chunky gutters of Bourbon Street. Mucus water rushed down the drains like my romantic hopes for the city, leaving behind a beery stench and your troubled narrator, puzzled over where to begin. Following the example…
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The Existentialist Starter Kit
It was a dark and stormy night when we received the late-night call that every parent of a college student dreads. “Dad,” my son said, struggling to present a brave front in the face of the disaster that had apparently befallen him. “Yes?” “I’ve become an existentialist.” I gulped, covered my eyes with my hand, and shook…
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Harvest, 1992
A muddy irrigation ditch, a few solitary power lines and an occasional pole barn were all that interrupted the otherwise tedious repetition of flat cropland. This was fly-over country. Today however Ms. Watson’s fifth grade class, with their shouts of excitement and disbelief from the open windows of the old school bus, ruptured the monotony.…
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Beyond Belief: Harry Houdini in the Age of Alternative Facts
If you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you. Is that a bargain? Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass Independence Day Eve 1878, at the age of four, Hungarian-born Erik Weisz immigrates to the United States with his pregnant mother and four brothers. The Weisz-turned-Weiss family settles in Appleton, Wisconsin, and later, in a boarding house…
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A Friend In Need
Knitting doesn’t cure the hopelessness. It only distracts. He never tells anyone. About either. He sleeps with the afghan—his finest work—and every morning stuffs it in the closet with his other creations. Green mittens. A red toboggan. Tonight’s drive to the liquor store is particularly cold. He rubs a circle on the fogged windshield with…
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House Cat Pantoum
In the window, I watch and sit. Birds light and peck the ground. Into the air, they dart and flit. I meow and make no sound. Birds light and peck around. Bumping the glass and twitching my tail I meow and make no sound. Such slender necks, weak and frail. I bump the glass and…
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Warped
I.Escaping scars as the years slowly tick byis inevitable. Banging into walls, the bruises and blisters of liferun like a roadmap. Trophies awarded for fortitude,for qualifying for life,for finishing the race. They are the markof a well-lived life. II.What, then, about invisible scars?Escaping detection in a mirror’s reflection,they lurk in deep crevices. Peeking out just…
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Reading and Decoding English
Reading and Decoding English 6 Letter 2.1 Dauntless Courage If you know people who have Dyslexia, help them learn to read starting with this column. It takes patiences to teach them the individual sounds. This is an excerpt from Title: Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley To Mrs. Saville, England. Archangel,…
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Boumediene v. Bush: Unanswered Issues and Current Moral Codification
In Boumediene v. Bush, the U.S Supreme Court was faced with a post-colonial issue regarding overseas authority and correlating precedents. Broadly, the question arose—for a third time since Rasul v. Bush (2004) and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006)—whether constitutional rights extend to non-sovereign territories under U.S control. More specifically, the case encompassed a question of whether…
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Pythagoras
Marya would die without the Pythagorean Theorem. It’s her security blanket. A-squared-plus-b-squared-equals-c-squared. She whispers it to herself at night. Because at only age eight, she’s witnessed perfection. Her parents proffer patient smiles as she tries to explain the beauty of something that is true, that was true two thousand years ago, that will always be…
