This morning, as I sometimes do, I had tea with breakfast, flipping on the electric stove in my apartment to start a kettle boiling. The distance from the stove to the cupboard was short, yet in that walk back I noticed the packet I had chosen — the brand of mint tea I had been buying and brewing for years — was not what I’d thought it was: what the company Bigelow had once called “Plantation Mint” was now “Perfectly Mint.”
I felt sick to my stomach (and not from any expectation of caffeine). I ran back to the cupboard…
I have a friend who goes to Indiana University Bloomington. He transferred there last school year from Ball State University, where he and I met (and where I am still studying), to pursue a more robust anthropology program.
Earlier this week my friend found out from his advisor at IU that, because he needs three more semesters of a foreign language to earn his B.A., he will not be able to graduate until at least Fall 2021. …
From the top of the hill, Montreal rose like a legion of readied rocket ships. A sky above only decorated with clouds, there to inspire the mortal fleet to touch the hem of some god’s garment. Pedestrians and cars at the bases served as the fretting ground crew: some plodding, some scurrying, some gazing up enthralled, everyone there to make sure the operation went off without a hitch. Une marine dirigée vers les étoiles. The Canadian Cape Canaveral. I didn’t see, as another American once observed, a city of one-hundred steeples: this was a launchpad the St. …
Last week, The New York Times and Siena College published polling that showed former Vice-President Joe Biden ahead of President Trump nationally 50–36 (the same margin the president went to war with in an earlier CNN poll). More critically, Mr. Biden led Mr. Trump by double-digits in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — all states the president carried four years ago. Mr. Trump’s responses to the coronavirus outbreak and the Black Lives Matter protests have dogged him since at least the end of May, strengthening Mr. Biden’s lead over him polls both across the country and in 2016’s battleground states.
On Sunday, Mississippi’s house and senate voted by wide margins to replace the state’s 126-year-old flag, whose design referenced the Confederate battle flag. With Governor Tate Reeves’s pledged support, voters will decide on a redesigned flag in November.
Mississippi’s is the last state flag in the country to feature the cross-and-stars battle emblem, a vexillological choice popular in the South during the height of its “Lost Cause” dysphoria. …
Not much about the real political options for LGBT advocates has changed in the last five years, despite Obergefell v. Hodges
Pundits fell over themselves to express their shock Monday after the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protected LGBT workers from discrimination within the workplace. The cases in question, consolidated into Bostock v. Clayton County, advanced the interpretation that Title VII’s purview of employment equality, regardless of sex, includes gay, bi, trans, and other queer workers. What the plaintiffs’ lawyers were arguing was this: because a man who is (or perceived to be) attracted to men can be fired from a job that a woman attracted to men would not be, or…
Allen Warren
Undergraduate English Studies major at Ball State University. The Hoosier antithesis to Mike Pence. /// Contact: allenwarren100@gmail.com.
