Here are some excerpts from an incredible podcast/interview with Michelle Alexander on Political Affairs. Michelle Alexander is a professor at Ohio State’s Moritz College of Law, and previously held a position as the Director of Stanford Law School’s Civil Rights Clinic. She also worked as the Director of the Racial Justice Project of the ACLU…
Last night, I finished reading “Strength in What Remains” by Tracy Kidder. It’s the incredible, heartbreaking, and moving story of Deogratias, a young medical student in Burundi who became a refugee during the genocide. It tells the story of his harrowing and indescribably difficult escape from Burundi and his subsequent arrival in the U.S. In…
I recently finished “Indefensible: One Lawyer’s Journey into the Inferno of American Justice” by David Feige, who worked as a public defender in the Bronx for nearly fifteen years. It is a fascinating account of his work and the stories of the clients he represents. Perhaps my favorite quote from the entire book is the…
An old man walks along a beach and sees a young boy throwing something into the water. As he approaches, he sees hundreds of starfish lining the beach, washed in from the tide. The young boy is rushing around, throwing the starfish back into the water one by one. The old man asks why he…
In “Our Turn to Eat,” Michaela Wrong writes about Kenya: Kenya’s foreign partners failed to grasp that a system of rule based on the ‘Our Turn to Eat’ principle was explicitly designed to prevent the trickle-down upon which they counted for progress. The better Kenya’s economy fared, the more unstable the country actually became, because…
“We are gratified for this acknowledgement that the concern for peace and the promotion of human rights are inseparable. Peace is not to be measured by the absence of conventional war, but constructed upon foundations of justice. Where there is injustice, there is the seed of conflict. Where human rights are violated, there are threats…