NBC News • March 2022

Groups opposed to gay rights rake in millions as states debate anti-LGBTQ bills

In today’s heightened culture war, the coffers of the anti-gay movement are overflowing. According to publicly available annual returns, 11 nonprofit groups identified as anti-LGBTQ hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center took in over $110 million in contributions during the financial year ending in 2020. The dollar amount represents a recent high-water mark for the organizations, whose take of donations, grants and other noncash contributions has increased steadily since 2016...

INTO • November 2018

For The Future of LGBTQ Political Leadership, Look To Red States

In 1977, the year Harvey Milk made his historic run for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, a New York Times reporter asked the firebrand activist why he, and several other gay men, were vying for political office. “I’m thinking of that poor kid from San Antonio, growing up in the bars, hustling, on welfare,” Milk responded. “That 14-year-old from San Antonio needs us!” Forty years on, a gay teen in south Texas still needs leaders like Milk. He just doesn’t have to journey to San Francisco

NBC News • August 2020

This dangerous ‘party drug’ has been everywhere — even on Amazon

It had been several years since professor Joseph Palamar had seen that unmistakable “caveman face,” the telltale sign of an imminent overdose of gamma-hydroxybutyric acid, or GHB. Standing among throngs of concertgoers at a Brooklyn music venue last year, Palamar spotted the bulky man with the contorted face nearby. He was struggling to remain conscious. “I’ve noticed that when people are meant to pass out and they keep forcing it, they make these very strange, primitive faces."

Slate • April 2019

PrEP vs. Privacy

When you’re a young adult on your parents’ insurance, your health decisions are a family affair. And that’s a problem for HIV prevention.

USAToday • April 2019

Notre Dame Cathedral fire: As a tour guide, I didn't appreciate it

When I lived in Paris for two years, Notre Dame was often a nuisance. I was attending graduate school and renting an apartment just a two-minute walk from the cathedral, thinking initially that I'd attend mass there on Sundays. Instead, I spent most mornings pushing through the throngs of tourists who were scattered across the church's plaza. I repeated this maneuver each evening...

Worldcrunch • July 2017

Holocaust Rhymes And Lamborghinis, A Jewish Rapper Breaks Taboos In Germany

Watching the music video for SpongeBOZZ’s latest single “Yellow Bar Mitzvah,” it is not immediately clear what is really going on. The first 15 seconds are a hodgepodge of menacing images and deafening noise. The video opens with a shot of a Hannukah menorah flickering in a dimly-lit room. As the frame widens, grainy footage comes into view of Orthodox Jewish men dancing to a spirited rendition of Hava Nagila. The camera then pans to a scantly-clad woman pushing a wheelbarrow full of cocaine...

The Paris Globalist • February 2018

Paris Flooded; Other Inland Cities May Be Next

Like Paris, most inland cities have not been key sites of scientific inquiry on the effects of climate change. However, it is evident that climate change-related risks to inland municipalities, most notably floods, are a grave concern. Indeed, negligence on this issue can incur high financial and human costs.

November 2016

The New US President, A New Foreign Policy?

Rhetoric is more easily produced than policy, a point the panel stressed throughout the event. In today's highly-connected and synchronized world, it will be very difficult for the United States to retreat from the global stage. “You cannot escape the world,” Moratinos assured the audience. Indeed, it will be difficult for Donald Trump to retreat on all fronts and in all regions where American involvement has been a cornerstone for years, if not decades.

Worldcrunch • October 2017

Al-Qaeda To ISIS And Beyond, The Battle Is Not About To End

The Islamic State is now on the run in Syria and Iraq. Following the terror group’s defeat this summer in its self-declared Iraqi capital of Mosul, ISIS has now been driven from its Syrian stronghold of Raqqa. This comes more than four years after ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared his “Caliphate” from the pulpit of the al-Nuri mosque in Mosul. ISIS’s aim was a break from the more amorphous strategy of al-Qaeda, with the Caliphate meant to be a reestablishment of the Prophet Muhammad’s th

GulfNews • December 2017

How South Africa forgot Mandela’s moral lesson

A new corruption scandal shows just how far South Africa’s politics has declined from the ideals set by the former president and anti-apartheid icon.

The Paris Globalist • May 2017

For French-American Dual Citizens, the Election Season Didn’t End in November

Mercedes Moya broke the news of Donald Trump’s victory in last November’s U.S. presidential election to her mother over the phone. Moya’s mother was on vacation at the time, and like most Americans who had been following the polls and 24-hour news cycle prior to 8. November, she did not believe what she was hearing at first. For Americans dismayed by the outcome of the previous election, 2017 has been a year of diligent vigilance. Having lost the fight to keep Donald Trump out of the White Hous

The Paris Globalist • November 2017

Two years after the November attacks, a gloomy walk in the City of Light

Flâneur. In French, it describes a person who wanders through a city, seemingly aloof, but truly engaged. The term has no precise English cognate — even Oscar Wilde, a master of language, kept the original French in De Profundis, the famous letter he penned from prison. For more than a century, the meaning of flâneur has grown alongside the cultural intrigue of Paris. Flâneur is reflected in Caillebotte’s sumptuous painting "Paris Street, Rainy Day" and Hemingway’s thoughtful strolls through the Jardin du Luxembourg.

Slate Magazine • October 2017

One Drag Queen’s Drama at a Paris Nightclub Reveals a City, and an Art, in Transition

When the fashion world descends on Paris each fall for a week of runway shows, afterparties, and celebrity appearances, the headlines follow. This year, among photos of Balenciaga’s platform Crocs and Thom Browne’s unicorn puppet, allegations that a gay club had forcibly ejected Violet Chachki, winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race seventh season, went viral.

The Paris Globalist • November 2016

Past the Stats: Two Photojournalists’ Mission to Humanize Deportees in Mexico

It is said to be the most traversed border in the world. Each day, some 130,000 travelers cross the U.S.-Mexico border at Tijuana. Many are American consumers in search of cheap goods in the Mexican border city. Others–around 70,000–are so-called “trans-border workers” whose livelihoods depend on the ease of access they have to foreign employment opportunities. Among the long lines of automobiles that snake across the border at Tijuana, is yet another, much smaller, handful of people crossing from the U.S. to Mexico...

Worldcrunch • November 2017

From Aung to Zimbabwe, Foreign Pressure Goes Only So Far

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s three decades in power may finally be over. Gunfire broke out late Tuesday in the Zimbabwean capital of Harare as military panzers moved in to prevent anyone from accessing government offices. At around 5 a.m. Wednesday, Maj. Gen. S.B. Moyo, a ranking member of the army, appeared on state television. “We wish to assure the nation that His Excellency, the President of the Republic of Zimbabwe […] Comrade RG Mugabe and his family are safe,” the commander said.

Worldcrunch • June 2017

Did Donald Send Dennis? A Reality Check In Pyongyang

Basketball star-cum-celebrity apprentice-cum-cultural envoy Dennis Rodman is in North Korea for yet another rendezvous with his “lifelong friend” Kim Jong-un, the Supreme Leader of the hermit kingdom. When Rodman last visited Pyongyang in 2013, he blasted then President Barack Obama for nurturing hostile relations between the U.S. and the pariah state. But now, under Donald Trump’s watch, the flamboyant celebrity’s travel plans take on a whole other dimension. Indeed, Trump is also a friend of

The Paris Globalist • April 2017

Thrǣdable Sheds Light on Lingering Refugee Crisis in Lesbos

In 2015, the popular, Greek island of Lesbos in the east Aegean Sea was overwhelmed. That summer, in addition to the seasonal flow of city slickers and foreign tourists, a new group of guests — refugees — arrived on the island in droves. In total, some 13,000 refugees made the short journey from Turkey to Lesbos by August of that year; many more crowded along the Turkish coast intent on following close behind on smugglers’ ships. With an emerging humanitarian catastrophe on its hands, Europe st

GulfNews • July 2017

India and China poised to be the world’s climate heroes

Both powers are being eyed as leaders of renewable energy, though the fate of the planet rests on all national and local governments to do their part When United States President Donald Trump pulled America out of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change last month, he declared that the historic international accord “hamstrings the United States while empowering some of the world’s top polluting countries”. He was talking about China and India. True, both countries are expected to increase emissi

GulfNews • November 2017

The Black Friday backlash from Europe

Long known to be an American phenomenon, this weekend-shopping frenzy is catching on in other countries — but not without its share of detractors Droves of customers stampeding through large department stores on Black Friday was once a uniquely American phenomena. But the traditional day-after Thanksgiving shopping sale event has recently gained traction in other countries that have no connection to the American holiday. The insatiable consumerism that fuels American capitalism, it seems, is a

GulfNews • August 2017

Can capitalism really green itself?

It is easier more than ever to purchase eco-friendly goods, but ultimately, we’re still just buying more stuff August 2 was “World Overshoot Day,” the moment when humanity uses more of the Earth’s ecological resources than the planet can regenerate in a year. This awkwardly named annual event, first conceived by the UK think tank New Economics Foundation in 2006, is a way to track the accumulating effects of climate change. And indeed, the day comes a little bit earlier each year. Just five yea