While we all have - for now - the right to remain silent, we sometimes also have the duty to speak. For me, that time is always, is now.

I love spring runs, and today was no exception. The morning air was crisp, a faint frost coating aspen catkins, mist enshrouding the reservoir, no sound aside from my footfalls and the cheery hoots of a Northern Saw-whet Owl. Up ahead the trail split, a fork I’ve arrived at many times before. The choices were […]

“Your great-great-grandfather, Frank Richmond Milnor, sat right here in 1858,” my grandfather said, pointing to an unremarkable spot near the riverfront in Alton, Illinois. “He was just twelve, listening to the seventh Lincoln-Douglas Debate.” My sister and I nodded, listening absently, the study of our rapidly-delaminating ice cream cones of greater focus and import than […]

I was going to write about chaos. The chaos raining down upon us by a populist fearmonger and his pedestaled, unelected, too-rich-to-really-care sledgehammer-wielder. The infantile shattering of all vestiges of American decency, a skulking retreat to shuddering isolationism and xenophobia paradoxically cast as a symbol of impending greatness. The resounding dearth of humanity in the […]