A Black Lives Matter Reading List

I’ll keep this short: the United States is a hot mess right now, and it isn’t because of the protesters. There are a ton of reading lists currently out there, but I also wanted to contribute my own to the mix. This list could’ve easily been four times as long. I intentionally left out some

Quickies: I’m Telling the Truth, but I’m Lying & Simon the Fiddler

I’m Telling the Truth, but I’m Lying by Bassey Ikpi Format: PaperbackPages: 257Source: Library What it is: A series of essays detailing the author’s immigration from Nigeria to the United States as a young child. As she gets older, she struggles with self-destructive behaviors, a complicated relationship with her mother, and bouts of severe depression; she’s later diagnosed with

The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World

Those of us who are not digital natives and remember a time before the internet became so central to society probably also remember the old-school ways of communication: phone calls, snail mail, face-to-face, etc. We now have the ability to do all of that electronically, and that’s a great thing: family members can Skype or

Grass

During World War II, the Imperial Japanese Army ran comfort houses — military brothels — throughout Japan and its occupied territories. The comfort women forced to work there were often not women at all but young girls who had been kidnapped or sold into sexual slavery. The exact numbers are still debated by scholars, but

Photographic: The Life of Graciela Iturbide

Graciela Iturbide is a Mexican photographer and artist whose photographs seem to straddle the line between stark reality and another dream world. She was a creative child who dabbled with a camera in her youth, but she didn’t dedicate herself to photography until after marriage, motherhood, and the devastating loss of one of her children.