Category: Blog
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An Ode to Military Spouses
One of my husband’s Soldiers caught me in the hallway. “Ma’am,” she said, “Can I ask you a question?” A little tired, I nodded. It had been a long day, after a long week, after a few long months of deployment. She looked at me with genuine curiosity and asked, “Is this hard? Is being…
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Seeing London, England
Seeing London London is home to one of the most ethnically diverse populations on the planet. Roughly one-third of Londoners are foreign-born, and while English is the primary language, more than 200 languages are spoken in this city alone. Walking the expansive city, it’s clear that London is a cultural junction of the world, something…
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War as Policy: The Russian – Ukraine Conflict Explained
This blog post comes in response to readers request for explanation on the Russian-Ukraine conflict. As the talk of war flashes across television screens, darkens the doorsteps of those in service, and is cause for concern for the United States, all of Europe, and the world as a whole, may this post help readers…
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Why Policy Matters: A Letter from the Writer
‘The military and I have an agreement.’ This is what I told myself. Not a real agreement, just one I believed in to help manage the stress that comes from regular uncertainty. In the seven years we have been active duty, it had become a pretty reliable lie. “We will do the good and hard…
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Why Policy Matters: The Story of a Syrian Refugee
Dear Readers, This piece kicks off a mini-series about why policy matters, all from very real stories I have collected while traveling. My skin was warm from a day in the sun, my cheeks rosy from a strawberry mojito. The Portugal sun beat hot against caramel colored sand, revealing a perfectly smooth, turquoise seascape. Small…
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The Birds & The Bees: Helping Afghan Refugees
THE BIRDS… A man airlifted from Kabul with nothing but the clothing on his back, carried with him a bird with a broken wing. This is a true story. The bird would not have survived had the man not brought the bird with him, and so the bird boarded the flight cradled in the man’s…
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The Footage from Afghanistan: Scenes of Policy
We have all seen the picture. The one of the C-17 military aircraft loaded well past capacity with Afghans trying to escape the rapidly spreading reclamation of Taliban rule in Afghanistan. When we see the picture and the videos of the people fleeing in fear for their lives, each of us see’s something different. Some…
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Foreign Policy
Before we get started, it is important to recognize that foreign policy is both complicated and contentious. Our approach to foreign policy abroad is constantly evolving as relationships with other countries develop and global events change our necessary or chosen course of action. In order to adequately understand foreign policy, we would need volumes of…
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Domestic Policy
What is domestic policy? “Domestic Policy” refers to the decisions made and the actions taken by a national or state government to deal with the internal issues and needs of the country, within the country itself. Domestic policies affect or pertain to problems within the borders of a particular country, and can only be enforced…
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Policy: Facebook & Instagram’s Data Use Policies
When I was a younger writer, I submitted a few pieces of work to sites like Thought Catalog, and HelloGiggles, and almost immediately pulled my work back after reading the publishing policies. While my name would get credit on their site, I would lose all control of the content that was published, and could not…
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Policy Basics
Before we get started with discussing individual policies, it’s important we establish a working foundation of the basics of policy. In this article, I hope to break down policy to its core components. Policy is complicated at every level, even down to its basic definition – I know, because when I began this article I…
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I almost quit the blog. Here’s what happened instead.
Dear Readers, It was my hope to post this in January, utilizing the momentum of the new year. The reality of living abroad during a pandemic with a team that is located in several different time zones is that things sometimes run slow, and the renovation was actually a lot more work than we originally…
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Children’s Relationship to Overconsumption & the Environment
Dear Readers, When I began my research on factors that shape contemporary children’s rights policy, I made the assumption that the primary driving force behind children’s global rights atrocities would be directly linked to the health of the economy. I wasn’t wrong (and we will talk about that next week), but when root causes were…