Between 1975 and 1979, an estimated 2 million Cambodians — 20 percent of the country’s population at the time — died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge regime. Some 17,000 victims were held in the regime’s most notorious prison, a former high school known as Tuol Sleng (“Hill of the Poisonous Trees”) or S-21. […]
Month: August 2018
The other day at brunch, as two of my friends and I were commiserating about things varied and universal, we agreed about the sluggish pace of our brains. What an injustice, I ventured, that our sluggishness is so out of sync with the blistering pace of this summer and of 2018. “Someone was telling me […]
Remember this time last year, when we were all so excited about the eclipse? And then it really was as good as everyone said it would be? Here’s the post I wrote on my laptop in the back seat of a car in the massive I-95 traffic jam on August 22, 2017. I’m writing […]
August 13 – 17, 2018 Except for Cameron, beginning and ending the week with sweet cheer, LWON seems to be having trouble getting through it all ok. Cameron grows zucchini and like anyone else who does, knows she need friends. And friends aren’t necessarily those guys on social media, they’re the guys who take zucchini. […]
Let’s call the thoroughfare I live on Lemon Grove. There are two signs for it, one at each end of our block. Until very recently, one of the signs read, “Lemon Grove Avenue”. The other said, “Lemon Grove Street”. When someone asks for my address, I usually don’t say either. I just say I live […]
Two years ago, a poet named Maggie Smith wrote a poem called ‘Good Bones.’ I printed it out, and I find myself reading it over and over again. “The world is at least fifty percent terrible/and that’s a conservative estimate,” Smith writes. Really conservative. Right now, I’d put the number closer to ninety percent. Nearly […]
After seven years living amongst our neighbors to the south, I have recently returned “home” to the US of A. I say “home” because I’m a West Coast kid and now I live in Baltimore, which is nothing like the West Coast. Honestly, I culture-shocked less moving from California to Mexico City. And also, because […]
The news that Aretha Franklin is gravely ill hit me like a punch in the gut. I’m not sure I realized it until that moment, but she provided an important anthem for my teenage years. Decades later, I can still remember how my high school girls track team would blast Franklin’s rendition of “Respect” on […]
