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Alison OK Frost Captures the Strange Absurdities of War and Discrimination

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Alison OK Frost creates delicate and disturbing watercolors. Her figures seem to be part of a post apocalyptic world even though they are all drawn from news articles. Stripped of context and background information they float eerily on the white page. Her images use the delicate style of watercolors to express the brutal elements of modern society. She wants to illustrate this dynamic in her work: “A few years ago I took part in the occupy Oakland protest and one thing that was really striking was how beautiful tear gas is, especially at night.

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Imaginings Roll Out!

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Across the cultural landscape, powerful dreamers everywhere are tapping into this same deep truth. Just two quick examples: the young organizers who formed Dream Defenders in 2013 to “develop the next generation of radical leaders to realize and exercise our independent collective power” chose a fierce and evocative name for their work. Earlier this spring, when Black Lives Matter called for voices to “help imagine a world where black life is valued by everyone, our rights are upheld, and the beauty and power that is our blackness is celebrated,” they called their action “In a world where Black Lives Matter, I imagine…..”

Culture

Cartoons of Free Speech or Hate? Redux

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Though the AFDI’s Islamophobic and racist actions is doing have been classified as “free speech,” that does not mean that we have to tolerate it by not speaking up. We have the right, as well, to take this case to the court of public opinion and call it out for what it is: a hateful reaction to an already minoritized and misunderstood group of people.

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Comics for the New Economy: The Art and Activism of Kate Poole

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At first glance, the fields of economics, religion, and comics seem utterly apart; a combination of two of them, let alone all three, would seem incongruous. However, in her innovative work, economist, artist, and activist Kate Poole delivers impassioned yet playful critiques of capitalism from a spiritual perspective.

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My English Teacher’s Son Won the PEN/Faulkner Fiction Award

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I met Lish half a century ago in a high school classroom in Millbrae, California. His kindness helped me survive four years as a strange, arty, activist teenager in a suburban world I found entirely incomprehensible, the first adult I met who looked at me and saw something other than an annoyance or a perpetual misfit.

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A Story of My Heart

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I haven’t the faintest idea how to sum up the more than 500 stories uploaded to the People’s State of the Union website since late January. They came from story circles – a hundred people in a church basement or a handful in someone’s kitchen – organized in more than 150 places around the U.S. They came because people resonated with the USDAC’s assertion that “democracy is a conversation, not a monologue.”

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TV Family Values

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My big TV-watching time is in the mornings while I exercise. I save up episodes of series I’d never give 100 percent of my attention, usually detective shows (and never medical ones). But there is one family drama in my queue: Parenthood. Yesterday morning I caught up with the final episode. As the characters’ lives fast-forwarded through the finale, my tears started to fall.