Posts by Nathan Graziano
For the young male, there have always been multiple warring factions within him, raging hormones battle with the dictates to be kind and respectful; a certainty in his own omniscience faces off with his ignorance; his dreams try to thrive while reality smacks him in the face.
A few weeks ago, a colleague stopped me in the hallway and asked if I had watched “Adolescence,” a new Netflix series that premiered on March 13.
As a teacher, I am allotted three personal days each school year, and as soon as I return to my classroom in August, before I even unpack, I put in for a personal day that will coincide with the Red Sox first official game, usually sometime at the end of March.
Next week, I turn 50 years old, completing a half-century of spinning around the sun. And I’ve noticed that many of the things that once shined bright in my youth have lost their luster. Many of the things that I valued and enjoyed—some of which I masochistically enjoyed—are no longer that important, or that much fun.
On Friday afternoon, both of New Hampshire’s senators joined the gutless minority leader Chuck Schumer and seven other Democratic traitors in voting to pass the GOP House’s obscene Trump-backed spending bill to avert the shutdown of the federal government as our federal government continues to shutdown decency and democracy, laying off millions of American workers.
I never fathomed that I would teach George Orwell’s novel “1984” in a media course. Published in 1949, the novel certainly has its merits as a deeply imaginative work of dystopian fiction, but what could it possibly teach about our contemporary media landscape?
O P I N I O N NOT THAT PROFOUND By Nathan Graziano Here is a personal secret: I have
What I truly admired about these Romantic poets, however, was the fact that it didn’t seem like any of these dudes had to work real jobs. While Keats did train to be a surgeon, he died before he could practice medicine, and guys like Lord Byron didn’t have to put aside “Don Juan” to scrub dishes.
When I was 12 years old, my cousin and I were racing our bikes on the street in front of my aunt and uncle’s house. We were gliding, neck and neck, toward the finish line at the end of the curb, when my cousin pulled ahead, and my front tire clipped my cousin’s back tire, launching me over the handlebars, face first, onto the cement.
It took a glorified carnival barker and his billionaire buddies, led by one of the most soulless and reprehensible people on Planet Earth, putting our democracy in grave peril for me to realize that, other than voting and writing a few op-eds along the way, I have not given much to a democracy that has given me everything, mainly my freedoms.