An old story about addiction, recovery, and an old friend — “He always listened to you,” your mother says to me and I don’t have the heart to tell her that wasn’t so. She doesn’t know about the time we were 25 and you jumped off the moving train and I picked gravel out of your back for hours or the…

The Dark MAGA Carnival Show that is Vowing to Get Nothing Done For Us — He’s big, he’s funny, and he’s gregarious. When Mark Robinson walked onto the stage at the Trump rally last month in Selma, North Carolina, the crowd went wild. Someone introduced him over the megaphone in a thundering voice as “the next governor of North Carolina” and he feigned bashfulness. Robinson…

Far-right extremists don’t give two shits about your school or your kids. When the first cases of Covid-19 were detected in my home state of North Carolina, my family was thrown into chaos. We scrambled to reset our daily routines. I was worried about the health of my parents a full state away. I was concerned for my neighbor who leaving her…

Occupy Greensboro was packing up. Tents were taken down, cooking pots stacked, banners folded. I loaded a number of large white boards into the back of my hatchback. The white boards felt precious — the scribbly, blue-marker handwriting was archival evidence of a community coming together, brainstorming, planning, asking questions…

Women and housing in the United States — When I was 18, I moved into a boarding house wedged between a cemetery and the train tracks. The room I rented was at the front of the old farmhouse and would have originally been the living room: It had a big drafty fireplace and a huge, generous window that…