life

  • Woke Is Back. But Maybe It Never Left.

    While everyone is celebrating the enormous blue wave that swept across America last night, I think we’re overlooking what may be the most important story of this election. It isn’t simply that Democrats won. It isn’t even the extraordinary number of Republican strongholds that fell. It’s what the American electorate told us about the kind…

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  • Whispers of Aliki

    Whispers of Aliki

    From the Case Files of Steven LaChance I sat back in the comfortable leather seat of the black sedan, taking in the sights outside the window and feeling the cool air from the AC on my torso. “It is going to be a very hot day here. They say it could be as much as…

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  • THE GLOW-IN-THE-DARK CASE

    THE GLOW-IN-THE-DARK CASE

    From the Case Files of Steven LaChance In June 2007, I got a call about a family that needed help. They lived in a house in the Missouri woods, which they claimed was haunted. The wife had been held down and supposedly beaten in the shower, and the door to the oven had been ripped…

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  • Ten Years Is Enough

    Ten Years Is Enough

    Ten years of this has been enough. Ten years of the hate is enough. Ten years of the division is enough. Ten years of seeing the worst of humanity brought to the surface is enough. I’ve told this story before, but I’m going to tell it again. Within the first half hour of Donald Trump’s…

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  • I’m Not Hiding

    I’m Not Hiding

    I read something recently that said LGBTQ+ people are going to start going back into the closet. I’m not sure how that is even possible once that door has been opened. It is true that in some ways we come out every time we meet someone new or find ourselves in a new situation. I…

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  • Quite Passive, Not Thinking

    What do you suppose Christopher Isherwood meant when he wrote these words? “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.” The beginning is easy enough to understand, and it is the part most often remembered. I am a camera. Isherwood was a writer observing the world around him, recording the…

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  • A Dream Within a Dream

    A Dream Within a Dream

    I’ve been reading a great deal lately about humanity’s place in the universe. The deeper I go, the more fascinated I become by one simple fact. Across thousands of years, civilizations that never knew one another often arrived at remarkably similar questions about reality itself. I’ve spent time in Sumerian texts, Buddhist teachings, Greek philosophy,…

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  • You Were Never Broken

    You Were Never Broken

    Can you imagine being a kid, going to church, doing your best to be good, and then hearing something that changes your world? The very thing you were born to be, they are saying, is unholy. That you are unholy. You go to school, so happy to make friends, and that’s when you’re called “fag”…

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  • The Man Behind the Microphone

    I’ve spent most of my life behind microphones and in front of cameras. In many ways, it is where I feel most comfortable because it was what I was trained to do. Broadcasting. Debate. Theater. Public speaking. Years of learning timing, rhythm, presence, and how to hold the attention of a room. I actually prefer…

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  • Hard Choices

    Hard Choices

    I’ve noticed a lot of people my age going through major life changes with their parents. Usually it begins when one parent passes away, leaving the other behind, sometimes no longer able to live on their own. In my case, after my dad died, my mother was left with dementia and unable to live alone.…

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