Category Archive: America

What to say about 2016?

2016. Whew. What to say about this year? A year of plotlines that would have made dubious fiction, played out in the newspapers instead. I tried to make a concise list of the… Continue reading

It’s all one world

My bus pulled up for a WC break on the way to Phuong Nha, Vietnam. A man drove a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin, Germany. Thousands of miles apart, but it’s… Continue reading

Firsthand account from Standing Rock

“Have you heard about all this fake news stuff on facebook? Isn’t that horrible?” asked the woman on the BART train last night. “Totally,” her companion answered, and added “like all this stuff… Continue reading

I’m just gonna keep Thanksgivinging

So…how’d it go? Anybody get in screaming matches about TrumpCo? Mashed potatoes remashed against the glass of family portraits that were hung in a tidier time? I wonder how many people gave thanks… Continue reading

Something unexpected and normal happened just now

I was well into my lineup of questions and answers, ordinal numbers and time sequences in class today, blue marker and red marker, hoping my students were getting something out of my antics… Continue reading

Hands Around Lake Merritt

Was election night as bad as it gets, or is the worst still to come? That sick feeling of disappointment, of alienation from your nation, of watching a big part of my demographic… Continue reading

Figuring out how to live under a Trump presidency

This is not the blog I was planning to post. After the initial wave of Denial, the “No way America would ever elect that” came the other stages. Anger. “Those idiots wanted a… Continue reading

Trump won. What now? Dear god, what now?

What do you do when your country elects a racist, misogynist, morally bankrupt unsuccessful businessman as president and national humiliation? Well. I don’t know about you, but I had ice cream and wine… Continue reading

Hillary headquarters SF on the eve of the election

I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, this was the San Francisco headquarters for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, not some cluster of cubicles behind a crossroads gas station. It was three floors of bustling… Continue reading

I think I’ll go call Florida

I have a friend who’s been phone banking for Hillary. No one’s seen her for weeks. This weekend she’ll be frantically making last-minute calls to swing states to pull for her candidate, and… Continue reading