Over the past five years, a quiet humanitarian crisis has been erupting in South America. Beginning in 2009, but especially since 2015, almost four million people, or one in 10, have left Venezuela. Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro’s regime are behind this steady and sure collapse of the Venezuelan economy and society. Yet as criticism
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For almost twenty years, I have written book reviews for a weekly newspaper in Western North Carolina. In general, reviewers take an interest only in new books. This makes some sense, as older books have already received their accolades or their slings and arrows. A few critics—Nick Hornby in his collection of reviews Ten Years
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How many school shootings happen in the U.S. in a single school year? The answer is surprisingly hard to figure out. In April, the U.S. Department of Education released a report on the 2015-2016 school year, stating that “nearly 240 schools (0.2 percent of all schools) reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting.”
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Early this spring I experienced something that has probably only happened to me once before: I had an overdue library book. Given that I was the girl in college who felt frantically behind on her homework if she wasn’t a week ahead in her assignments, this was a bit distressing. But, I gritted my teeth
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A few months back, I regaled readers with a story about my first confrontation with the state, a head-to-head match that left my brother and I jaded as we packed up our lemonade stand on the boardwalk in Ocean City, New Jersey. This summer showed how little has changed. Several news stories emerged detailing how
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Are you the parent of a young child? If so, I’m willing to bet that some well-intentioned person has sent you a YouTube video called Child Abduction (Social Experiment). I’ve been sent this video 5 times over the past several years, the most recent instance being last week. The video goes thus: a guy named
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