In America, too often the dead don’t only die once.
They die again when they are mislabeled.
They die again when their story is stolen from them.
They die again when their last moment is twisted into a sinister justification.

The first death, a catastrophic loss of breath and blood and future… death by hands, fire, a knife, a gun, a rock…

On Friday, October 31st, we lost a very important member of the A Cow in the Sky family, my most dear, lifelong friend, and one of our producers, Kirsten Rota.

The day Kirsten died, I had spent the morning and afternoon with a beautiful group of her loved ones, visiting her in the hospital. On my drive home…

It’s often said there are only seven stories in the world - or perhaps twelve, or twenty - or maybe just one, depending on which theorist you ask. The number doesn’t matter. What matters is the implication: that all human stories share a spine. A common pulse.

I love a good story. I have always LOVED a good story. One of my earliest memories of falling in love with a story was when my mother read me Eric Carle’s picture book Frederick. I was mesmerized by the collage world of trees and rocks and adorable little, big eared woodland mice. I was even more captivated by the story itself!

When Tom Metzger launched his public access program Race and Reason in the 1980s, he didn’t storm the screen with boots and shouts. He appeared calm, almost professorial: collared shirt, measured cadence, a desk and backdrop designed to look respectable.

If hate is permitted as free thought, but hate itself wounds, can we really claim it as a right? A framed composition of playful brush strokes and pops of purples, oranges, earthy browns, dusty blues, hung on a rough, white plaster wall in a hallway of my childhood home. I loved to look at it. It was kind of messy, chaotic, silly, and it drew me in constantly transforming for me.

I was always the smallest kid in my class, a late bloomer in every sense, so the only role I landed in my high-school production of Inherit the Wind was the child on the witness stand.

I grew up Catholic in an unusually liberal pocket of downtown New York City. My father, a humanistic psychologist turned Catholic convert, was deeply involved with the Catholic Worker Movement. But there was another part of him I barely knew. My father's family were first-generation Americans descended from Austrian Jewish immigrants.

From Rodgers & Hammerstein’s warning to Tom Metzger’s concrete handprints, how prejudice is passed down - and how to stop it.

Quick background. I was a copywriter at a Madison Avenue advertising agency in midtown Manhattan.

The sad truth is that music can be wielded for harm as easily as for healing. To understand Portland, OR in the 1980s, we have to understand how art and culture, especially music, played a part in both the rise of hate and the resistance against it.

In the small, rural upstate NY town where I live 21-year-old Gerson Santamaria Turcios runs his own lawn care business. He built it himself after graduating from the local high school.

From Tribeca to a new substack. Watch our video and join us!