Thank you #MarRef

140 characters is usually enough

I am so, so proud today. Thank you to everyone who canvassed, leafleted, debated, argued, worried, cried, laughed, begged and loved.

We fought for the best cause of all: Love. Nothing was easy or ever seemed certain, but in hindsight, how could we lose?

We fought for equality, for generosity, for kindness. We fought for our sisters, our brothers, our children, our parents, our friends.

We fought for LGBT children, long dead, whose lives were made a misery by a brutal, unloving Ireland.

We fought for LGBT children now grown older who – until only 22 years ago – lived in a land where their very existence was a crime .

We fought for LGBT children just born, or yet to be born, who will now live in a kinder and better Ireland where the love in their heart will mean as much as the colour and the beauty in their eyes.

Senator

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“I hunt for objects made by men” – An archaeologist’s day in the field

Letters From The Field

A recapitulation. In which is reported an archaeologist’s daily field routine at the excavation.

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Can I Avoid Disaster?

The SisterWives

It is too easy to get caught up in the process, sometimes, of what we do. We forget why we started in the first place. This letter, from Sarah, arrived for us one day, and we all wondered what we might have to say to someone who was so earnestly seeking advice.

Quite a bit, it turns out. Today, we will hear from Michelle, who wrapped her arms around it in the way that only she can.

Thanks, Sarah.For reminding us.

I’m Sarah. I’m 23. And I was wondering if you could help me answer a few questions.

Some background: I’m working on recovering from the frighteningly non-unique mess that is childhood sexual abuse followed by self harm. And I want to be beautiful, and strong, and kind. But stereotypically, early to mid 20 something’s are kind of the opposite of all of those things. I don’t want to suck…

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It’s Not Just You

The Daily Dahlia

Confession: probably my biggest pet peeve on the planet is when people start a question with “Am I the only one who…?” No. You’re not. You’re not the only one who writes that way, reads that way, likes that food, likes that band, thinks Benedict Cumberbatch sounds like a Game of Thrones character or looks like someone squeezed Spongebob and stuck googly eyes on him…you’re just not. But. There’s a different kind of “Is it just me?” feeling, and that’s the stress of when you’re drowning in something and nobody’s talking about it and you feel like everyone’s got it together but you, and so you don’t wanna say a thing, and it all snowballs until you basically wanna curl up and die. I know that feeling. It’s why I wrote this post after splitting with my first agent. So in case you are wondering any of these things, I…

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Intricate worlds

follow your nose

The sun is already well above the horizon, but I go on down anyway.
It’s a tiny paradise of riotous sound down here, a cacophony of birds – funny to think we associate being in nature with quiet, when it can be so very noisy.
A red-winged blackbird flies straight at me as if to say, Hello! Where have you been? It’s been a few days, and you’ve missed all kinds of things – the buds are all over the trees, the geese have taken over the duck ponds, and they fight with the muskrat who’s always after their eggs, and the turtles are back, and so much is going on… what happened to you?The push-pull – some days I think, really I don’t need any more half-assed nature photos, so I skip it, stay home and do yoga.
Other days I head out, starting with a kind of…

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Toward a Saner View of Text Complexity

To Make a Prairie

As happened a few years ago, when eighth grade students took to Facebook to share reactions to a nonsensical passage about a talking pineapple from the New York State ELA test, this year’s Common Core-aligned test made it into the news again for another Facebook incident. Somehow a group called Education is a Journey Not a Race got their hands on a copy of the fourth grade test and posted over three dozen images of passages and questions on their Facebook page. Facebook quickly took the page down, but they couldn’t stop the articles that soon appeared, such as “New York State Tests for Fourth-Graders Included Passages Meant for Older Students” from the Wall Street Journal and “Educators alarmed by some questions on N.Y. Common Core test” from The Washington Post. 

As their titles suggest, these pieces took a hard look at the kind of questions and concerns teachers…

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