Earlier this week, the family of Henrietta Lacks settled a case with ThermoFisher over the use of special cells, HeLa cells, taken from Lacks’ cervix during a routine biopsy when she was being treated for cancer. When I first heard this story, one of the things that concerned me...
Two years ago, when I started a new job, my prospective boss, who had already targeted me as a liberal, asked how I would feel traveling to the Midwest, maybe 1-2 hours from the nearest big city. It was not a simple question. Politically, I was probably going to...
I’m about to switch jobs, and I was riding in the car with a girlfriend, waxing poetic about my work, and she was saying "uh-huh, uh-huh" and I really thought she was getting it, but then I asked point blank – "Are you understanding ANYTHING that I am saying?"...
I saw this in Quora.com and it hit me very hard. When I wrote Visitation about a woman visiting her son in prison, the conversation was purely from my imagination, combined with my own visitation experiences and having done volunteer work at a prison for women. I knew women...
June 24th, 2022. It has now been one year since the Dobbs case in which the US Supreme Court nullified a woman’s right to an abortion and left it up to the states. Almost immediately, every state in America enacted anti-abortion laws. Thirteen states, mostly in the South but...
I’m going to start by embarrassing myself – I was many years old before I ever heard of Juneteenth. Many, many years old. I think I know why. My mom was from Massachusetts, where it would not have made sense, so it was not in her repertoire. But from...
Did the radio show interview over Memorial Day weekend and several people called in and said what their favorite stories were. One woman said that her favorite story was "Her Question" about the single father who is explaining boys and love to his thirteen year old daughter. She talked...
There has never been a time in my life when I didn’t know someone in the LGBTQ community, so I guess it’s hard for me to understand why the fact that a person is LGBTQ is such a problem to others. When I was young, I had a great...
A few weeks ago, I saw a service that uses AI to write a blog. And I tested it out. I entered 30 different topics that I have blogged about or planned to blog about. I chose "serious" for the tone, and said to gear it toward older African-American...
I read the most interesting article about guns today by Isabel Fattal in the Atlantic Daily. The anniversary of the mass shooting at Uvalde is coming up, and what do we have to show for it? In contrast to the desires of most Americans, who want to see gun...