We’ve often been told that the truth is in the details. After all, details are what give shape to an individual life and clarify it amidst a crowd of people, places, and events. When it comes to things we experience in times of war or geopolitical conflict, some...
abaca, n.1) from the Tagalog abaka via the Spanish abacá (see also Treaty of Paris, 1898) 2) a strong fiber derived from Musa textilis, a plant of the banana family; also “Manila hemp” 3) now mainly used in paper products and traditional Filipino clothing, such as...
Tuscarawas County Courthouse, New Philadelphia, Ohio My small, beat-up suitcase in hand, I stood on a sun-drenched sidewalk in downtown New Philadelphia, Ohio, wondering what to do next. Surly buildings loomed over blocks of deserted streets, a reminder that it was...
Author’s Note: Technology has always enabled war. Throughout history, the nation-states that created new weapons through innovation greatly expanded their geopolitical influence. From gunpowder, to the airplane, to the atomic bomb—advances in technology have been the...
Take these seeds and put them in your pockets so at least sunflowerswill grow when you all lie down here.— A Ukrainian citizen My grandfather worked as a seed breeder and farmer at Fordhook Farm in Southeastern Pennsylvania. Sometime in the late 1930s, he crossed the...
How We Drink Coffee When It Rains War by Sarah Sassoon https://www.consequenceforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/How_We_Drink_Coffee_When_it_Rains_War_Audio_-_Sarah_Sassoon.m4a We weren’t expecting it to rain, not when you can still see blue sky. It comes in one...
Booza by Katherine Shehadeh https://www.consequenceforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Booza.m4a Stretchy ice cream, now this is a first. My mother-in-law, a powerful but warm matriarch, who has somehow managed to raise eight kids (nine if you count me) to meet any...
Ukrainian soldier rescuing a tiny baby from the devastation caused by Russian shelling near Irpin in Kyiv oblast | Photo: Timothy Fadek, CNN Author’s Note: I’m thankful to Askold Melnyczuk whose words made me want to write in the midst of this war in Ukraine. I’m also...
I can’t write anything long because we’re still on the run, with my kids who are right here next to me. So, in brief: Ukraine was not “dragged into” war; it was attacked. Without even a pretext like Hitler’s attack on Poland. I know other...
Ursula Zadik’s German passport, issued by the Nazis on December 9, 1936.This is the second page, which shows the Nazi insignia stamp. My parents, Ursula and Erwin, didn’t leave Nazi Germany until 1939. By then my father had been in a concentration camp and my mother...
