The following blog is a piece I wrote as I was working on Long Island with many Latino laborers in both my restaurant and vineyard jobs. It was 2008, and I was on the brink of starting a graduate history program studying the history of US/Latin American Relations. I was becoming increasingly aware of the […]
Since the beginning, I have been accused of being didactic in my writing. This is something that perhaps can be excused in writing non-fiction, but in the world of fiction and poetry, many view it with scorn. I guess that I have found it my duty to use whatever talent I might have been endowed with […]
The other day while I was working out at the gym, I saw this muscular guy wearing a t-shirt saying, “Always Give 100%.” This got me thinking, “Do I agree with this premise?” The answer was surprisingly, NO. Upon deeper contemplation, this is something I have been considering for a while. However, this conventional wisdom […]
When I was a nine-year-old boy, devouring scraps of hip-hop from MC Hammer, I was just getting my first taste of music that would be a major force in my life. In hindsight, Hammer was pretty lame, but in my defense, I was too young to know any better, and it was a gateway for […]
The Music of My Youth Influenced Generations In light of recent events, it seems to be as important as ever to celebrate African-American culture. One of the many amazing contributions of this historically oppressed group is hip-hop, which not only gave birth to an immensely popular genre of music but inspired millions of people across […]
The universe supplies us with the materials to create possibilities. Many physicists such as Fritjof Capra and Amit Goswami contend that consciousness, rather than matter, is the basic building block of our existence. Goswami explains the situation thusly in his book The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World, as quoted in Daniel Pinchbeck’s […]
In SimCity, people get the opportunity to live a simulated existence in a virtual civilization, an ironic sub-reality. Facebook’s Farmville users play the role of virtual farmers, planting crops, tending to livestock, and harvesting produce. People now have the time and means to sit around and farm for entertainment, while they buy their groceries at […]
The proliferation of technology has sped up exponentially with time. As our lives become more intertwined with machines, attention spans and personal interactions have continued to diminish. In response to a nonstop stream of information, our minds are more scattered than earlier generations of people. There is no evolutionary or historical precedent for our current […]
Flaunting and accumulating wealth has become as important as the pleasure we derive from the product itself. The United States has often been billed as a classless society, but for a land supposedly devoid of the aristocratic titles and social divisions of the British Empire we escaped, we have pursued social stratification in other aspects […]
I remember, as a child, my parents taking me to Main Street in the little village of Sherman, NY every year to see old men marching in tight pea-green and ash-grey uniforms with rifles resting on their shoulders, but they were not what interested me about Memorial Day. What excited me, were the pretty […]
