Journalist – Historian – Speaker
Today’s latest piece at CNN comes from a simple observation, but not one I’ve seen made often: This is actually the third school year impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. And it doesn’t feel like we have a real plan. Throughout, I’ve been pushing (in various essays, tweets, calls with school admin, and more) for educational …
If we’re going to achieve herd immunity against Covid-19 in all its variants, it’s becoming increasingly clear that we’ll need to impose vaccine mandates. But the details matter. I argue we should use existing systems that already mandate other vaccines, rather than trying to create new ones. In a few weeks I’ll be required to …
I think a lot about how to process living through a global mass death event. I don’t know how to do it even for myself, but am pretty sure that we’re all experiencing levels of trauma, albeit in very different ways. I try to read stories of people we’ve lost until it gets too much. …
This week we buried my father-in-law and I wrote a very difficult essay about loss. Every single death, in all contexts, covid or not, has been shaped by this pandemic. We can’t mourn, we can’t access the community we need to process loss, and the trauma of all these delayed and denied rituals will carry …
There’s Covid-19 in our house. We caught it because the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) wrote “may” instead of “must” into a special education guidance document. We caught it because our school district decided that “may” would equal no for them. We caught it because when forced to choose between abandoning our son’s education or …