We have never had more ways to communicate, yet I wonder if we have forgotten how to have a conversation. I have spent much of my life talking. As a journalist, radio host, teacher, and activist, I’m familiar with the power of words. [...]
Pat Taub
We have never had more ways to communicate, yet I wonder if we have forgotten how to have a conversation. I have spent much of my life talking. As a journalist, radio host, teacher, and activist, I’m familiar with the power of words. I’ve learned how to ask questions, challenge authority, make an argument and, when necessary, raise my [...]
Pat Taub
One of the things I like about getting older is discovering I am still capable of surprising myself. I am not the woman I was at thirty, or fifty, or even seventy. I have different strengths now. I have accumulated experience, perspective, mistakes, friendships, memories—and, thankfully, wisdom. What I don’t want to accumulate is the [...]
Pat Taub
There are too many mornings when I wake up with a heaviness. Sometimes it’s the weight of the world. Sometimes it’s the accumulation of years, recognizing there is less time ahead of me than behind me. I have been an activist for much of my life. I have marched, protested, written, spoken out and stood with people who were fighting for [...]
Pat Taub
Lately I have been thinking about the meaning of home. Not the wonderful Victorian space I have lived in for almost 14 years; my neighborhood of tree-lined streets; the welcoming market; the Maine coastline that still takes my breath away. These places remain. What has changed is the country I thought I knew. I no longer feel at home here. [...]
Pat Taub
GUEST POST by TOM SANTULLI On the sidewalk a rusted shopping cart overturns: cans and bottles spill, clattering along the pavement. A frazzled, disheveled older woman scurries to retrieve her day’s income. Cars race past, oblivious. On the church nearby a multicolored banner proclaims, “STRONGER TOGETHER.” It too, oblivious. Connection [...]
Pat Taub
Contemporary beauty standards celebrate the older woman whose aging lines have been erased by cosmetic surgery, making her look years younger. Stretched out faces have become ubiquitous, no longer confined to film stars and celebrities; middle-income women are lining up for procedures from Botox to full face lifts, or traveling overseas [...]
Pat Taub
“Don’t talk to me about Gaza. It’s too depressing.” “I refuse to read anything that involves the Orange Tyrant.” A dinner party invitation: “We’d love your company. Be forewarned: it will be a politics-free night.” –Common responses to news stories of the suffering in Gaza; Trump’s mean-spirited laws targeting [...]
Pat Taub
These days your favorite news sources likely feature stories about the war in Iran, desperation in oil-deprived Cuba, voter disenfranchisement, and Trump’s massive corruption schemes, relegating news of Gaza to a few paragraphs, reflecting ‘Gaza fatigue.’ After two plus years of waking to screens dominated by the genocide: bombed-out [...]
Pat Taub
GUEST POST by ABBY FULLER Each year on May 15, Israelis commemorate that day in 1948 when their country declared its independence, For Palestinians, May 15 is Nakba Day—when they grieve their ancestor’s expulsion from present-day Israel. It is impossible to understand the relationship between Palestine and Israel without understanding [...]
Pat Taub
Several years ago, I participated in a National Geographic “people to people” tour to Cuba. Now that Trump’s oil embargo is threatening Cuba’s very survival, I’m sharing my memories of Cuba for those unacquainted with its amazing people. Everywhere I went Cubans were open and warm, eager to share their impressions of daily [...]
Pat Taub