Posted on

He’s Not Broken

As an autistic man working in a non-STEM, empathy-driven field — a quality society often wrongly assumes autistic people lack — Eric Garcia recognized how little neurotypicals grasped autism’s diversity.

Posted on

Relevance Rediscovered

At 49, Greg Michie gave it all up. His tenure-track position. His flexible schedule. His unhurried lunch hour. (His lunch hour, period.) In 2012, as a citywide teacher’s strike loomed, Michie left the relative comforts of higher education. He returned to the undervalued but indispensable work of public school teaching in America.

Posted on

Cake and Conversation

As writer Bekah Brunstetter shows throughout her funny and moving play,  The Cake, reconciling traditional roots with progressive values in a polarized world is wrenching work. And while no one should expect to abandon the things that sustain her — be it waffle fries, her faith or the person who has captured her heart — what should be expected, the play shows, is conversation, with a generous dash of understanding and more than a pinch of heart.

Posted on

Step Into Those Shoes

They elbow one another for space in his mind: young black teenagers and their worried mothers, old white supremacists and their nervous wives, skeptical lawyers, gravelly voiced journalists and a slave who mailed himself to freedom inside a box.

Mike Wiley not only plays them all on stage — often more than two dozen characters in a single performance, with no costume changes and few props — the documentary theater actor and playwright rehearses himself to sleep at night with their dialogue, their humanity and inhumanity, strumming through his head.

Posted on

The Client She’ll Never Give Up On

While they waited for Superior Court Judge Howard Manning to read the court’s finding — minutes that seemed almost as long as the six years Christine Mumma had worked to free Greg Taylor — Mumma became more convinced they had lost, while Taylor simply prayed that his heart would not give out. They waited together for a moment that had never before happened in the history of the judicial system, neither of them daring to believe.

Posted on

Rye Barcott Goes to War

Two o'clock in the morning and the noise is deafening. Rye Barcott gets dressed, grabs his machete. It sounds like war coming down outside his shanty in Kenya, and swarms of people are running toward the railroad tracks on the border of the Kiberan slums. Barcott follows the candles, the flashlights, the moonbeams that shine like an interrogation lamp; he follows the banging, to a man who lies bloodied in the middle of an enormous mob. He's a thief, a mwizi, and his tale makes Barcott lose his voice. A villager stands over the mwizi. He appears to be flicking something at him. Seconds later, the thief is in flames.

Posted on

Governer on Guard

Gaston Caperton overcame dyslexia to become a millionaire and rise to West Virginia's highest office. Now he leads the venerable College Board into a new century - and, he hopes, a new relevancy - on the Web.

Posted on

Washington taking a shine to rising star Sen. Edwards

WASHINGTON -- From Union Station's newsstands to the city's corner drugstores, John Edwards' face stares out at Washingtonians from the cover of Capital Style magazine, so large that his senatorial pores can be counted like beans.

"Building the Perfect Senator," the headline reads. "John Edwards is rich and rugged. But is he ready?"

The answer is, he'd better be.

Posted on

Jordan grants unveiled in Washington

WASHINGTON -- In what may be the smallest gym he's performed in since his high school days in Wilmington, Michael Jordan unveiled one of his retirement plans Friday: a $5 million program that will give teachers of disadvantaged students money for new equipment and new programs.