Tiya Miles's Blog

I’m shocked at how much I can still be shocked by current events. As a colleague said recently, there are so many bad things happening each day that we can’t even process them before the next day, when another set of bad things has already happened.

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The relentless onslaught of horrible events is exhausting and frightening, which is surely an intended effe...

Some of you commented that you liked the “postcard” format from my June post, so here is another one! Over a long weekend this summer, my family visited Yellowstone National Park. This has been an annual tradition of ours for the past decade. My favorite place to stay in the park is the Old Faithful Inn, a remarkable melding of architectural and natural beauty. Many of the rustic chambers have shared bathrooms with other guests. Twice we have had mice sneak into our rooms through the century-old...

I knew things were going to get worse. You did, too. Still, I was unprepared for the desolation I felt after Congress narrowly passed their menacing mega bill (“BBB”) on July 3rd. It felt like a perfect storm.

I won’t go into the awfulness of the bill’s contents; I’m sure you’ve read and heard it all. (Senator Lisa Murkowski’s failure to save the country when she alone had that opportunity was heartbreaking.) I didn’t watch fireworks on the 4th of July for the first time in memory. My household w...

I just returned from Ireland where I researched Irish abolitionists and witnessed firsthand the glorious countryside that I had only seen represented in films and novels. This will be a quick Carrying Capacity, a postcard of sorts, drafted under the influence of jet lag.

While I was taking notes, touring abbeys, counting sheep, and (mostly) staying away from social media and news coverage, blips of information from the US appeared and then faded like nightmarish mirages. An ICE raid swept up fort...

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I used to be able to pinpoint the cause of my insomnia— disruption and stress from the latest Trump-related atrocity. But last week, I woke up at 4:30a.m. with another prick of worry: generative AI, artificial general intelligence, or whatever we’re supp...

It has been a long winter here in New England, but now signs of spring are popping up. Color is blooming in the trees, and warmth is pushing through the chill. Our atrocious political environment shows hints of green shoots, too.

Many of us no longer harbor illusions about the gravity of this moment and the threat to our democracy and liberties posed by the present administration. I won’t offer a detailed review of horrible events, because you kn...

The campaign to destroy the federal government from the inside is revealing something hidden and immensely valuable. We have been entrusting our lives to noble federal employees, and we might not even have noticed.

It turns out that so called “deep state” “bureaucrats” live and work in every state where they provide essential services. We need these individuals. We rely on their depth of experience, wealth of knowledge, ...

Last week was brutal. Trump’s cruel treatment of Ukraine, which translates into America’s cruel treatment of Ukranians, was the terrible reality my mind turned to when at rest. But whenever I felt I was nearing despair over the state of our country, someone stepped in to lift me up.

Once it was the shopper in Whole Foods who tried the sample citrus slices and recommended them to me, while allowing that the peanut butter cover...

I come to you again without the right words to express what I am seeing, dear friends. It is dark outside as I write this, and cold. The darkness gives me courage to say things that may strike you as strange, things that my editor will not check because I will post this spontaneously before bedtime.

You are not imagining things. This nightmare is real. Today we saw a sickening ...

I haven’t been a regular Bible reader since my childhood years in Sunday School, when I relished the challenge of memorizing verses and reciting them before the whole church. But when I sat down to write this note to you, three words came to mind: “guard your heart.” Was this a dormant Bible verse resurfacing? I looked it up, and found this:

“Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.”

-Proverbs 4:23, New International Version

This moment that we’re all living through is...