By Any Other Nerd

We know that stories are often more convincing than statistics and straightforward facts.  Memoirs and personal accounts are a powerful means of capturing the big systemic issues that permeate our culture’s white supremacy problem.  These books, all the way back to the 1800s the present provide powerful first-hand accounts about what it means to not be white in a culture that privileges white identity.  Each one speaks to things that many white folks never truly understand or even pause to consider in our lives.   With so many to choose from, I still did not hesitate with When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors .  Khan-Cullors is one of the founding members of Black Lives Matter.  When I hear her story and the personal, familial, and social challenges that pushed her to be a founding member, it is moving and powerful and pushes me to be a better person that fights against injustice.  Despite how the media portrays the Black Lives Matter

Lion Boy by Zizou Corder My rating: 3 of 5 stars Note: This review was originally written in the early 2000s and published for a no longer running website: AudiobookCafe.  This review is of both the book and the audiobook. In “Lion Boy”, the first book in a trilogy by Zizou Corder, we meet Charlie, the boy who can talk to any cat and whose parents have been kidnapped away. Set in a semi-destitute future, where asthma has become a dominating trait for most of the world and oil is no more, Charlie with the help of cats everywhere, sets off from Africa to find his parents. The future world proposed by Corder feels almost like a different world. While they have cell phones and motor vehicles, the story maintains a nostalgic feel to it from the 19th century. This feeling is only further encouraged, when Charlie joins a traveling circus and later on, and later travels by train with the King of Bulgaria. The story starts off quickly as we are introduced to Charlie and given a brief gli

It's time for the next episode of The Weekly Pop--that's number 6!  I know I've been on a bit of a hiatus but I got a bit busy, plans got rescheduled and well...these things happen right.  But I'm back and I've got a good line of the next 7 episodes!     You can watch here, on YouTube or just read all about it in the post below.  Enjoy and let me know what you think!  Also, don't forget to check out Episode 1 Episode 2 Episode 3 Episode 4 Episode 5 You can watch  this episode on YouTube  and  all the other episodes  as well.  (Also, feel free to subscribe to my channel on YouTube as well). As always, you can find the full script below, but also, you can get the slide deck itself and the original script , which is covered by a Creative Commons license...of course. Here we go: So for those that follow my blog, they know that back in April, I delivered the Liberal Arts Lecture.  This next series of videos in the Weekly Pop is my truncated v