The LEWIS Registry

The folks from the USC Safe Communities Institute stopped by to talk to me about the new LEWIS Registry. The Registry is a crowdsourced public database for police officers who have been fired or resigned during an investigation of their behavior. In addition to the front, public-facing, end there is a backend for use by Law Enforcement. The team at…

10 books, 15 series … 2020

When Death Takes Something From You Give It Back: Carl’s Book by Naji Marie Aidt, Denise Newman (translator) This was one of the first things I read in 2020 – I should reread it again. It feels like something everyone in the world should have read in 2020. About grief and living with it. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by…

On trolling in academia

The nickname we have for persistent, consistent societal problems is wicked problems. These issues are complex. These problems are pervasive. They are a result of decades (centuries) of institutional policy build up on top of so many other forces. There was a recent opinion in Inside Higher Ed in which a Professor Jim Moore laments the unwillingness of “certain” communities…

A dismal 2049 to look forward to …

Not a week for finishing things. It was a hard week. Beginning with late night Sunday news from Las Vegas … being glued to the news all Monday, followed by a scare at USC. Everything felt on edge, a little too bright, a little to brittle. Breakable and fragile. It was a week for hugs. For discussing solutions with smart…

Hard to find the words

This Monday is particularly hard to get this started. Another mass shooting, another round of “if it wasn’t a white man” and “now isn’t the time to debate policy.” Without knowing what motivated this man, this white middle aged man, we won’t know if it was religiously or politically motivated. I hope they find some reason, the senselessness feels overwhelming.…

#TakeAKnee to Take a Stand

Well, it’s officially Fall. While it doesn’t seem like most of the country feels the cool, crisp, breezes yet, LA is finally seeing a bit of a cool-off.

Monday, September 25, 2017. Last week in review.

Reading: from Jane Austen to Claudia Rankine. From sports and racism to empathy and storytelling.

Power vs Empathy: Yapa’s debut novel

I’m looking forward to more from Sunil Yapa. His debut novel, Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, is thought-provoking and heartbreaking. Yapa takes us back to Seattle, 1999, on the first day of the WTO meeting and the protests that turned into the “Battle of Seattle.” Using multiple points of view, he delves into the question…

Ptolemy Grey, physician-assisted suicide, and the Kantian question of the future

This conversation is one of the things I like about my job. I wish more people could have these kinds of discussions. Perhaps we wouldn’t be so averse to real questions of end-of-life decision-making if more people had time and luxury of thinking about the big questions. I’ll just add that Danielle was a hold off too on this point…

8 film companions for the great Drought

So … reading Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner was intense. The great and terrible history of the American quest to tame the desert is one in which the intentions never matched the outcomes. It added one more thing to my guilt load. Discussing this with a few other women, we had the same reoccurring thought “what should we do?” I don’t know. I live…