As a teacher, my reading is circumscribed during the parts of the year I call “terms,” restricted for the most part to the books I’ve assigned and the writing of my students. For the most part. The exception comes during the hour or two I spend in my writing shack each night around cocktail hour, a period of time during which I read whatever the hell I want. Often, as I’ve described in here before, I jump from book to book, looking for chunks of words—sometimes mere snippets, sometimes whole chapters–that inspire me or make me think about my life and work a little differently and that, hopefully, quicken my pulse.
Laquan MacDonald was seventeen and murdered by a Chicago police officer in cold blood. I watched a video of his murder, along with most of America, right in between reading about how Americans are terrified of letting refugees from war-torn Syria into the country, and reading about how a man with a rifle opened fire at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado, and now hearing about San Bernadino.
I can’t think of anything else to say that hasn’t already been said about how horrible and sad and awful and bleak and shitty and unfathomable all of those things are. I can’t. I don’t have the words for that today. So instead, here are fifteen things that you can do to make your world just the tiniest bit less shitty and terrible.
This past weekend the 
