Features Blog

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle provided us one of the most important definitions of what it means to be human, namely that we are “zoon politikon” –that we are political animals. Aristotle added some nuance to this definition when, in his Politics, he said...

I am one of many entrepreneurs who watched an invisible nemesis whisk away current and potential business as the coronavirus moved across the map. Add to that the disappearance of funds from my retirement portfolio. One morning, I woke with tears in my eyes that led...

In early January I was struggling to quit drinking again after a relapse. I would go for a week, twelve days, then find myself walking into a liquor store and buying four nips of Absolute vodka. Yes I’m an alcoholic, my purchase affirmed to the clerk. I had given up...

Forty-seven percent (that’s 47%) of Americans do not have $400. in cash available for an unexpected emergency.      This is a statistic that has stuck with me for a very long time, one that reveals most directly a dysfunctional economy, and...

Living mere blocks from the university where I work, it is easy to see the vast generational divide in how we view and are experiencing the COVID-19 virus pandemic.  Online, a colleague made a post to Facebook pleading with others to join in calling Idaho...

I’m a nurse practitioner and I’ve been working at Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program for twenty years. Yesterday, March 25th, I was called in to work at our main facility, on a floor where one wing is hastily being transformed into a COVID-19 unit, where we...

To think about the implications and permutations of the coronavirus is a daunting affair with no clear-cut solution.  The thought of being volitionally incarcerated in one’s home would have been inconceivable a few short months ago. Perhaps a few short weeks or...

Talking with DeBorah Gilbert White, founder of HerStory Ensemble: an American NGO, which supports the empowerment of women who’ve experienced homelessness, or are at the risk of homelessness. HerStory Ensemble promotes education, awareness, economic...

America’s current obsession with veterans and supporting them has seeped into our daily routines since the initial invasion of Afghanistan almost twenty years ago. Eateries and oil change shops offer discounts; furniture stores back their commercials with rippling...

“Is it not strange that sheep’s guts could hail souls out of men’s bodies?” Benedick asks as he listens to Balthasar sing and play his lute in Much Ado about Nothing.  “There’s part of me, lying on a page,” I sometimes think reading a poem, feeling...

Little Women is nominated for an Oscar for best picture and writer/director Greta Gerwig for best adapted screenplay. This recognition by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is well-deserved. But it is not enough. Gerwig deserves a nomination for best...

She was a big girl. Over six feet with enormous hands. She wore a skirt, silk blouse, and oversized pumps. Black hair framed her face like curtains. It was 1994, long before Caitlyn Jenner put a famous face on the puzzle my English class was trying to solve. The...

“This hospital would be impossible for anyone with a normal brain to navigate,” Barbara says, eyes flashing anxiously. We stand arm in arm, staring at the colored squares and rectangles on the wall map that shows Building A connecting to Building C via hallways called...

Interview with Martha Nichols, editor of Into Sanity, Interview by Lee Hope Editor-in-Chief, Solstice: Essays about Mental Health, Mental Illness, and Living In Between — A Talking Writing Anthology Could you describe how you see the “ancestral threads” of mental...

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In 1983, when I was a sixteen-year-old sophomore in high school, two teenagers in my town hit a tree head on at a high rate of speed, resulting in their deaths. It was one o’clock in the morning on a Friday in early June. The sound shredded the sleep of the residents...

Managing Editor’s Note:  In this piece by William Crawford, his photo of a cemetery in a town devastated by contamination from mining triggers a touching essay about the birth and death of a town and the melancholy words of Tom Rush, a popular folk...