Can you taste it? The taste of joy when quarantine ends, the panic shopping eases up, and we can get on with the new reality of civilian life. The coronavirus pandemic will change the way we live. However the new reality takes shape, we’ll be ready and eager to get back outside. Not to mention delirious with relief. Until then, safety first. But at least we have plenty of books to turn to as resources and for escape during quarantine! Read more →

With the diploma in hand and the graduation cap thrown jubilantly into the air, the question remains: What’s the next step? Graduation heralds new beginnings and transition. But where and how to start? How should we prepare for the future when the world around us changes on a compulsory basis? In his book Don’t Knock the Hustle, S. Craig Watkins asks the same question and says we should plan to be future-ready. “What should schools be doing? Instead of preparing students to be college-ready or career-ready, schools must start producing students who are what I call ‘future-ready.’ The skills associated with future readiness are geared toward the long-term and oriented toward navigating a world marked by diversity, uncertainty, and complexity . . . a future-ready approach prepares students for the world we will build tomorrow.” Read more →

By S. Craig Watkins | For more than a year Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had been waiting for this precise moment: 8:59 p.m., June 26, 2018. That was when the polls in her Democratic Party primary contest against incumbent Joe Crowley in New York’s Fourteenth District would start to close and the final votes would be tallied. Ocasio-Cortez had campaigned for ten months to win an election that virtually nobody thought she could win. That morning her staff still did not know where they would hold her watch party. It was yet another sign of what a long shot her campaign was. They finally settled on a billiards hall in the Bronx. Read more →