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Where Were You on 9/11?

I would not say that I remember it completely, but I was in an 8:30am staff meeting on Tuesday, September 11th, 2001. Not exactly \"at\" the meeting. I was dialed in to the meeting; I was in North Carolina and the meeting was in Massachusetts. Knowing me, I was...

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Africa is a Beautiful Continent

I was reading a headline recently about the coup in Gabon and once again I noticed that Africa only seems to be in the news when there is violence. I then looked at CNN and saw articles about violence in Niger, Libya and Sudan. If that bothers me, I’m...

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The Rise of Black Superheroes

The summer is coming to an end, and with it is the glorious run of superhero movies that provide us with the opportunity to suspend our reality so that the good guys always win. (Except with cliff-hangers.) I have been a fan of superheroes since, oh, maybe 8 years...

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Salaries: Where are our Values?

August is upon us, and I am a football widow once again until February. And if I was a mother, I would be preparing for the school year – buying supplies and clothes. A friend of mine recently said that the whole purpose of a blog is to use...

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Hip-Hop Turns 50.

Hip-hop just turned 50. Born in 1973 when an 18-year-old DJ performed at a party, sampling songs and beats on two turntables so that the music never stopped. It was expected to be a fad, created by young people. In the early 80’s, my boyfriend from New York City...

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Medical Research vs. Exploitation

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...

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Adventures in the Midwest

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...

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Product Safety – It’s What I Do

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?"...

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A Mother’s Love

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...

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