Commentaries

Summer of 1968, just before I went back to graduate school, I did fieldwork for the “Canadian Association of Retarded Citizens.” Our team was doing a cost-benefit analysis of services for children who had been diagnosed as “retarded—a diagnostic term that is no longer...

Just over a century after the release of D.W. Griffith’s film “The Birth of a Nation,” Nate Parker’s film of the same name came to the silver screen. While the Griffith film justified the Ku Klux Klan and portrayed white racism as the salvation of America, the Parker...

After finishing college, I spent some time in grad school in New York City. Caught in a depressed mood swing, I didn’t want to live in a dorm or share an apartment with other people, so I found a place I could afford at the edge of Harlem. The building in which I...

 This subject is a thirteen-year-old male,” Professor Hogan, which is not his real name, announced as he passed the test protocols around the seminar table. Having just completed my first year of graduate courses in Psychology, I had wangled my way into the...

Personally, I’ve never wanted to write a memoir. I’ve never thought my life complex or meaningful enough to warrant one. My preference has always been to stand back and observe while others took action and risk, which is not to say that I have no great moments of...