I want to start by making something unequivocally clear: I believe there is a genocide occurring in Gaza, p erpetrated by the Israeli government with the support of the United States government . Nothing I am about to write changes that position. I have been writing about the treatment of Palestinians and the conditions in Gaza for more than twenty years, as documented by the date-stamped posts still sitting on my personal Blogger account, formerly BlogSpot. This isn't something I discovered on October 8, 2023. But I think the sheer scale and horror of what has happened in Gaza since October 7 has obscured something else that should never be obscured: The October 7 attack, led by Hamas and carried out alongside other armed groups, was horrific too. I want to name Hamas immediately and deliberately because the distinction matters. Hamas is not the Palestinian people, just as the Ku Klux Klan does not represent the American people. The actions of an extremist organization should nev...

I am a single mother looking after my octogenarian mother and my Gen Z teen, so I deeply understand the value of time. I have very strong views on the genocide occurring in Palestine . I don’t usually talk about it on this platform. Not because I’m apathetic or apolitical , and certainly not because I’m afraid of offending somebody. I just happen to know that a lot of the arguments people are having online are being carried on with bots. And when I think of good uses of my time, arguing with a computer pretending to be Keith from Ohio is not one of them. I’d rather this space sometimes be an escape from all of that. A shared memory. The love of a song. Something that reminds us of each other. Before I get into any of this, though, I want to make something very clear: I am completely unfamiliar with Ed Sheeran’s work. I could not tell you the name of an Ed Sheeran song. If you played one for me right now, I could not point it out and say, “Oh, that’s Ed Sheeran.” The only exception I ...