Almost 20 years ago, the nation turned its eyes on a small town in Crittenden County, Arkansas-West Memphis. In 1993, three 8-year-old boys-Stevie Edward Branch, Christopher Byers, and Michael Moore-were found hogtied and mutilated in a nearby river. The town fell to hysteria, screaming for justice. The police department and townsfolk went to work looking for the seditious culprit(s). A few days after the discovery of the bodies, the witch hunt showed up on the doorstep of Jason Baldwin while him and his close friend, Damien Echols, were watching TV. The two were arrested, along with Jessie Misskelley Jr., for  the murders of the three boys. ... Read More »

America’s suspicion of Iran’s nuclear production capabilities seems to have slipped out the backdoor of national media. The last article that I could find in the New York Times pertaining to nuclear weapons in Iran dates back to last year in MidNovember. An “issue” that was at the forefront of the presidential debate on foreign policy has houdinied from our nation’s political dialogue. Nonetheless, if you mention Iran, the nuclear scare will probably resurface in the minds of others. Basketball is the last conversation that would be had, but the American sport is just the thing that set in motion the documentary The Iran Job.  The ... Read More »

If you’re 20 or older and have ever been a teenager on the verge of adulthood, you probably recall the confusion of trying to make sense of your position in life and whatever that coming of age business means, suggests, or creates/destroys. If you were fortunate enough to have parents who cared enough to ask you tough questions and spin you round and round, blindfolded, till you were too dizzy to know which way was eastwest or northsouth, you can probably recall a fight or two or eleven raised to the ninth power. I know, between my mother and me, unfinished homework was always ... Read More »

As I merrily approached the end of my senior year of high school my ipod began to fill up with bands of a gentle sound. I thought the days of cramming into small, sweaty spaces to hear fast, angry music were behind me. I was too cool, too mature for that hardcore nonsense that had preoccupied the days of my adolescence. By the time I graduated I was so mellow, so passive. I had pardoned all the wrongdoers in my life, had passed on my boiling animosity to the next generation of pimply tattered faced teenagers. I had been cleansed. So over it. But wait, why ... Read More »

Some of the most recognized names in the literary world today fell victim to their place in history, receiving little to no recognition during their lifetime. Such writers include Jane Austen, Edgar Allen Poe, Henry David Thoreau, and the subject of this write-up, Sylvia Plath. Plath, who wrote most of her acclaimed work from the mid ’50s to the early ’60s, was swept under the sardonic rug of literary criticism and left to be forgotten. Because of the fact that Plath was a woman, her personal, cathartic poems were regarded as overemotional and pathetic. Weak writing that was consequential of womanhood, according to modern critics of her ... Read More »

In the Czech Republic, there is a famous church known as the Cemetery Church of All Saints. Unlike most medieval ecclesiastical buildings that are still operating, the Cemetery Church of All Saints is modest in size and rather plain-looking from the outside. It was constructed in the early 1400s in the middle of a necropolis where thousands of victims of Bubonic Plague and the Hussite Wars were buried throughout the 14th and 15th centuries. What makes the cathedral a world renowned tourist attraction is not just its peculiar location, but what lies beneath the church: A tiny chapel named the Sedlec Ossuary. (An ossuary is a ... Read More »

If I’m honest (a good person on their good days will try to be), I’ll tell you I know nothing about the art of dance. Have me watch a professional dance performance, ingeniously crafted and executed by some of the most adroit artists, all I’ll be able tell you is that they made a pretty picture. And that will be the extent of my opinion. Technique and mechanics, it’s all lost on me. I can’t articulate that which I know nothing about. So when I watched the trailer for Stephen Petronio Company’s performance of Underland, I labored to locate useful adjectives in the empty space of mind ... Read More »

  They say (I think they say) that a literate people is a premise for a successful economy. (I really don’t know if they say that; I think I read/heard it somewhere). I don’t doubt that this claim holds water (or soured milk?), but parents don’t have the nation’s wellbeing in mind when they teach their kids how to read and write. No parent says to themselves: “I guess I should really get started on the alphabet with Timmy; the Dow has been suffering lately.” No. They have their children’s wellbeing in mind. Good parents teach their children how to read and write so they stand ... Read More »

Art making is a process. A kind of development humans consider their natural right to control. So art resists us. Art stares up at us from a blank canvas or page, from the noiseless ivory rectangles of pianos, from the shapeless lump of clay sitting in the pottery wheel, from the empty seats in the auditorium-muted, deaf, blind. No matter how much we kick art in the shin, pound our fist into its chest, call it foul names, pull its chair out from underneath it, and cry and cry and cry, art, often, refuses to budge. But sometimes art cooperates as if it wanted to help ... Read More »

  You know those people you hear about or talk to who force you to question your own ambitions in life? You know, the people whose response to the “what do you do for a living” question goes something like: “Oh, well I spent last month in Antarctica collecting rock samples that oncologist believe may unlock the cure for cancer. But before that I spent a year in the Himalayans, documenting the mating habits of Tibetan monks. And next week I’m flying out to Croatia to babysit a nest of endangered sea-turtles till they’re  old enough to venture into the ocean.” Suddenly, your life seems like a ... Read More »