From the desk
Writing
Essays, op-eds, and mind wanderings on justice, policing, aging, the trail, and whatever else won’t leave me alone.
-
Nunc Aeternum: The Eternal Now
by Joe Broadmeadow ❧ There is a single moment that has never ended, and you are standing inside it. We speak of time as a river—Heraclitus dipping his hand into a current that has already moved on. But the river…
-
The Wishing Stone
A Short Story Toby Greer found the stone the summer he turned eight, on the gray strip of beach below his grandmother’s house, where the bay went out so far at low tide it left the world looking emptied. It…
-
The Lisbon Instrument
An alternate history: What if Germany developed the bomb first? I. Haigerloch, Württemberg — 3 May 1943 The pile sat in a cave cut into the rock beneath the castle church, and when Dr. Ernst Kolbe came down the stairs…
-
The Emergency After the Emergency
The Self-Inflicted Wound When presidents invoke the Defense Production Act, it usually signals a country bracing for crisis. This time, it looks more like a belated attempt to cover one up. President Donald Trump has turned to the Cold War-era…
-
I Was Told There Would Be Angels…and Secret Messages
Near Death Experiences…really? Nobody warns you, before you nearly die, that the whole affair will be such a colossal administrative letdown. You go in expecting Revelation—capital R, trumpets, the full Cecil B. DeMille production—and you come out with a bumper…
-
The Ledger of Small Things
The first falling leaf of fall came down on a Tuesday, and Marta Szymanski noticed it because she noticed everything now that she had decided to die. She was sitting on the back steps of the house on Oleander Street…
-
Eleven Minutes
What if? What if the recent meteor strike that rattled New England had hit downtown Boston instead of the ocean? What if, in this time of rising fears of nuclear weapons proliferation, a series of both human and systems failures…
-
Walmart and the Case of the Inadequate ID
By Joe Broadmeadow Somewhere in this great country, at every hour of every day, a corporation stands as the thin blue line between civilization and total collapse. For most of my life I assumed that was the job of the…
-
A Creator is Not Your God
“Does any one know where the love of God goesWhen the waves turn the minutes to hours?” Gordon Lightfoot”The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald By Joe Broadmeadow I read a recent Atlantic piece, “The Evidence That God Exists.” It draws…
-
Witness Marks
The first time I saw the boy, he was sitting on the back steps of a triple-decker, holding a blood-soaked towel to his cheek and staring at the empty lot across the street like it owed him an apology. He…
-
Coming this Fall!
From the author of Collison Course, Silenced Justice, A Change of Hate, and Pieces of the Past. When a wealthy widow realizes there is no real help for women trapped with dangerous, violent men, she decides to build her own…