“I think our country sinks beneath the yoke. It weeps, it bleeds, and each new day a gash is added to her wounds.” Washington has a thousand titles for power.It has fewer for the people who make power comfortable. Bondi, in this version of Shakespeare’s play, is not the dagger—she is the hand that steadies it. She is not the crown - she is the voice that tells the crown he’s allowed.

Keys. I'm holding keys. Five feet from my car in the early morning darkness, Anne's apartment building at my back, and the keys are already in my hand—have been in my hand—will always be in my hand because that's what I do, isn't it? Hold keys. Check locks. Make sure. The boy's hand. Small. Six years old. Reaching. Footsteps behind me.

Music Matters for Moral Imagination The crisis of moral imagination is not primarily a failure of information. It is a failure of formation. We live surrounded by arguments, data, and opinions, yet increasingly unable to recognize what is worthy of love, what demands resistance, or what is sacred enough to be defended at cost. Moral imagination withers not because we lack facts, but because our inner world has been flattened.

Anne The room is white—clinical white, the kind that erases shadows and makes everything feel like it's happening under surgical lights. The air conditioning is set too high. I can feel it on my bare arms, raising goosebumps along my forearms. I'm wearing a thin cotton blouse—navy, long-sleeved, but the fabric is light—and black trousers. Professional. Neutral. The kind of outfit that doesn't draw attention.

Act 1 Subject: A. Location: Apartment 3B, Avenue, Chicago, IL Recording initiated at 21:03:17 CST Female Voice: “He won’t be here long. He never stays long.” (Unintelligible response) Female Voice: “No, I didn’t tell him. But he knows. He always knows.” (Unintelligible, low-frequency interference) Female Voice: “If you’re going to do it, do it soon. I won’t be here tomorrow.”

Enough,to the investigators who allowed federal agents to block a public sidewalk. Enough,to the judges who allow Homeland Security to "self-investigate" the execution of a citizen… Enough,to the “Constitutionalists" who scream about the Second Amendment but remain silent when a legal firearm is used as a retroactive death warrant… Enough,to the media outlets that repeat the phrase "intent to massacre" alongside the video of a man being pepper-sprayed while holding a phone.

Father’s hand was a rule I understood without words.It meant forward, it meant the street will not swallow me,it meant my shoe stays tied. The morning smelled like chalk and the bitter peel of oranges.I counted the cracks— one for each year I had learned. We were late. This mattered because Father said so,and Father saying so kept my world together.