Our America

Thank You for Not Leaving Us All Alone

Thank You for Not Leaving Us All Alone

Deported Venezuelan soccer player, Jerce Reyes Barrios with his older daughter Carla and baby Isabella. (All photos courtesy of his family) On a recent evening, I sat in the San Diego office of immigration attorney Linette Tobin. Her two- year-old pug, Cujo, played at our feet. I waited for her to make a FaceTime . . .

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Hey J.D., Thought You Might Like This!

The Honorable James David Vance, United States Senate288 Russell Senate Office BuildingWashington, DC 20510 September 19, 2024 Dear Senator Vance, I have to admit it. When I first came across that sound-bite moment from your recent interview with Dana Bash, I thought it was a hoot. “If I have to create stories . . .

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The Jim Foley Story

Jim Foley with staff and graduating students at the Care Center in Holyoke. From left to right: Irma Medina (Care Center staff), Glenda Suarez (Care Center graduate and teen mom), Jim Foley, Aimee Loiselle (English GED Teacher), and Maria Salgado (Care Center Transition Counselor). Photo courtesy of the Care Center. Today is . . .

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James Baldwin’s Presence

Many are the privileges and rewards that come from being an editor. All the more true when you’ve been called into service for a magazine with a storied and lengthy history like the Massachusetts Review. Despite fifteen years in the trenches, I only recently became aware of a conference that had taken place . . .

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The Madness of Militarism

Editor’s note: On November 15, 2023, Norman Solomon delivered the Second Annual Ellsberg Lecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a lecture series hosted by University’s Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy. The text below is based on a transcript of his remarks, excerpted and edited for publication. In 2019, Ellsberg made UMass . . .

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PETP, or, Unintended Consequences

“There is a crack, a crack in everything,That’s how the light gets in.” Since the October War on Gaza began, I’m told, we’ve been killing a thousand children a week. For an instant, when Joe Biden said, don’t repeat our mistakes, there was a flash, a glimmer, a mirage maybe, but there was . . .

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Unwavering Clarity of Purpose

I’ve been thinking of Juanita Nelson lately. What would she think of the state of the world right now, our relationships to the earth, to one another. What would she say about how we are living? Juanita was one of the few people I’ve met in my life who truly lived her . . .

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Open Letter to President Magill

September 26, 2023 Dear President M. Elizabeth Magill: My wife Anna Botta and I have many wonderful memories from our days as graduate students in Comparative Literature at Penn in the late eighties and early nineties. One in particular will serve to frame and reflect our complex experience this past weekend, when . . .

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Reclaiming & Correcting the Rock Aesthetic

The Black Rock Coalition emphatically and wholeheartedly condemns Jann Wenner’s thoughtless misogynistic and racist statements in the New York Times regarding women and Black artists. While his comments were beyond reprehensible, they are no major revelation to Black artists who’ve struggled with the White rock establishment from Day One: Wenner only confirmed and re-emphasized . . .

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