The new year brings with it the rush of resolutions, self-improvement, and promises that this year we’ll finally get our acts together. Nowhere is this truer than the college classroom. Students file in ready for a new start. Professors do, too. This month, I welcomed students with the same ritual I’ve practiced for each of the last 10 years: supplying them with a carefully crafted course syllabus to guide our time together. Despite the January of it all, to hear some of my fellow educators tell it, my students likely responded with their own ritual: ignoring the syllabus altogether.

Read More

On a humid evening near the end of August 2017, around fifty people gathered at the African Burial Ground in Richmond, Virginia, to remember a man largely forgotten in American history. They’d come to remember Gabriel, an 18th century enslaved blacksmith, and his rebellion, one of the most extensive conspiracies by enslaved African Americans against slavery. That day last year was the 217th anniversary of the failed uprising.

Read More

A few months after my daughter Cypress turned two, we sat in the bathroom together in full-on potty-training mode. It was a time marked by frantic foot races to the bathroom followed by seemingly endless waits once there, concertgoers ready for the show, unaware the band hadn’t yet showed up. Cypress perched on the toilet, feet dangling, elbows on knees, her chin in hands.

“Come on, come on,” she said to me, not un-sweetly.

Read More

On a cool June day, Dean Dimond looked out from his back porch at a field of green wheat bending in the wind. Dimond lives on and farms a patch of land in the Magic Valley just north of Jerome. A mile or so beyond is Minidoka, site of the former Japanese internment camp where the National Park Service is building a memorial.

Dimond is, by any measure, an enormous man, with frying pan-sized hands that engulf yours in a handshake. He makes his living growing hay and corn for the dairies that populate this area where he has lived nearly all his life. It's a good place for this kind of farming. Three counties in the Magic Valley--Jerome, Gooding and Twin Falls--have the highest concentration of dairies in the state.

So you wouldn't expect Dimond--a self-described staunch Republican--to side with a movement to slow and even stop the expansion of large dairies. But as he looks over the field just feet from his back door, the contradiction begins to make sense.

Read More

In the first glimpse you get of Doug Scott that Friday night in July, he is taking an extra-wide turn on to Eagle Road. The footage isn't grainy—it's digital, from Idaho State Police Trooper Jesse Avery's dashboard cam—but makes most movements seem almost ghost-like.

Avery has been hunting Scott's dark work van since an officer from another agency saw Scott driving erratically. Once he finds Scott, Avery slips his cruiser behind the van.

As he tails Scott, dispatch crackles in.

"If you're unable to find PC, we'll give him a call back and he'll meet up with ya." The female voice is friendly, a little bored.

Read More …

After the hearing in Richmond, after activists and academics and law enforcement members testified to change Virginia’s marijuana laws, and after a General Assembly subcommittee struck down two bills that would do just that, what was left in the hearing room was this: a small baggie of a “leafy substance,” stashed behind the podium. It was a message from a movement that’s growing state by state, subcommittees be damned.

Read More …

Well that was fun, wasn’t it? I mean that nice, two-year bit of semi-hope and change. But now it seems we’re back to the grind.

You don’t have to be prescient to see Congressional gridlock just up the road. Our favorite almost-vice president is laying the ground work for a 2012 run at the White House via reality television. Our populace while handing the House to Republicans, elected another Paul to Congress, this one named after the author of Atlas Shrugged.

Read More …

Todd Lucas is a difficult man to doubt. He is earnest and he is forceful and he is a person possessed of an electric personality channeled through a gleaming sledgehammer of a smile. So if Detective Todd Lucas of the Charlottesville Police Department says that there are gangs operating in a fair city such as this, your tendency is to goddamn well believe him.

Especially now. It is a Friday evening in early spring, the air just beginning to warm, the sun slowly dipping below the western mountains. And Lucas is tucked behind the wheel of his unmarked, two-door white sedan, stuffed in there, really, because he is fairly bulging with radios and handcuffs and badges and whatever else it is that police officers tuck into the front pockets of their bulletproof vests when they leave HQ for a night of jump-outs.

Read More …

Before we get into the chemical compounds and statistical trends and tonnage numbers sure to scare the hair right off a hippie, let’s you and I define a word. Ambitious. The definition of this adjective, I think we both can agree, rests in the details of one particular plan of President Barack Obama.

Obama made it the goal of our nation to cut our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions 80 percent by the year 2050. And on April 17, word leaked that Obama’s EPA plans to propose regulating GHG emissions, a sharp reversal of the previous administration’s policy

Read More …

First, they were turned away from Fuddruckers, then Idaho Pizza Company, farther out. But here at Shari's, just west of the Idaho State Police building in Meridian, John Carter and Mike Ludlow are finally able to sit down to dinner, black Glocks still strapped to their hips.

The evening, up to this point, had certainly taken on a no-room-at-the-inn feel. Their objectives were simple: to sit down in a restaurant with their handguns clearly hanging in hip holsters, and to enjoy dinner with other like-minded and explicitly armed individuals.

Read More …