After nearly a century of scoring women on their looks, the Miss America contest has announced that it is ending the swimsuit portion of the competition. Starting next September, participants will no longer be required to parade before judges — and an audience of millions of television viewers — in skimpy beach wear and high …
After my daughters were asleep and our house settled into the stillness of night, I cried. The tears, held back as we talked about Valentine’s Day parties and sorted through candy and cards, as we wrangled over a research paper on Stevie Wonder due the next day, as we danced in the kitchen and kissed …
To the parents of the boy who called my daughters the N-word: I don’t know who you are. Perhaps we pass each other at the local Kroger or rub elbows at open house at our children’s elementary school. Maybe we both rise before dawn to sweat at the same boot camp workout or share the …
We want to look away. Close our eyes to ugliness. Turn our backs on racism. Bolt the door against bigotry. We want to change the channel – and shut out the horrifying images from Charlotteville. A car plowing into a crowd rallying against racism. Bodies flying. Screams. Panic. Confederate flags wielded as symbols of white …
Be strong. Be good. Be kind. Those were my parting words to my two young daughters as I left for work this morning. I kissed them lightly on the foreheads, but really I wanted to grasp them in a tight embrace and never let go, to protect them against an onslaught of ugliness that I …
“Mommy I love you.” That text chilled my soul. It came from Eddie Justice, who was hiding in a bathroom at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, trapped there by an unhinged gunman who would kill 49 people and injure 53 others. In his final moments, in the early hours of June 12, Justice — …
By now, you’ve most likely read, heard, watched and dissected almost everything there is to read, hear, watch and dissect about “Hamilton,” the Broadway leviathan widely referred to as a “hip-hop musical.” The show about Alexander Hamilton has broken records for ticket sales, box-office revenue, cast album downloads and Tony nominations. Its creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, …
I am Latina 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. My identity doesn’t fit in a 30-day window designated by the government. It’s not something I can discard when convenient, or don on special occasions. It is who I am. It is an identity that fills me with pride, creates …
It was the exclamation point that got me. There, in the last paragraph of the flyer stuffed into my front door by a local lawn service trolling for new business. There, amid the grammatical errors, misplaced apostrophes and random capitalization. There, at the end of a phrase that left me simultaneously ice cold and boiling …
So much of Allyson Bird’s blog post “Why I left news” rings true. Newspaper work is hard. The hours are long. The stress is wearying. The pay can be woeful. The business is changing, not always for the better, and scores of talented journalists are fleeing – or forced out – for other, not always greener, …
It is easy to get discouraged about the future of journalism. It is easy to look at dropping newspaper circulation, reports of fading readership, and tales of waning standards and discern the death knell of the industry. It may be easy, but it’s wrong. I say it’s wrong because I have spent the last two …
“As I look back over a misspent life, I find myself more and more convinced that I had more fun doing news reporting than in any other enterprise. It is really the life of kings.” —H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), journalist and curmudgeon, The Baltimore Sun It’s funny how each step of life seems to build …
Really, that should be a question. How to teach writing? I just spent the bulk of this week at a training workshop for high school English teachers who will be teaching pre-AP (Advanced Placement) classes. Aside from understanding and decoding literature, writing is at the heart of AP curriculum. So that question – how do we …
Now, I remember why I’ve always loved journalism. Why I still love journalism, although I may not be in a newsroom full-time anymore. And why I decided to combine my love of the craft with the joy of working with students. A week on the NAHJ student projects will do that to me. The seven …
Jaime Escalante died today. The calculus teacher made famous in “Stand and Deliver” was 79 and leaves behind a legacy and an example all teachers should follow. He believed all kids could learn. He believed in bulldozing the stereotypes that kept inner-city students from the opportunities available to their affluent counterparts. He believed in challenging his students to try …
“It is not my job to judge, but merely to pull the curtain back to reveal this hidden world behind it.” -Eudora Welty I always thought this quote summed up my approach towards journalism so beautifully. I am not there to judge other lives, but to pull the curtain back on moments, struggles, and issues that might …