I’ve spent a lot of time over the last four years working with kids. Some come from great families. Some from families that are just trying to hold it all together. Some don’t even know what the word “family” means.
I’m really lucky. I have two: my birth parents- still together- John and Vicki, and my “adopted parents,” Buddy and Barbara. They didn’t adopt me. I adopted them.
I could write about all the ways both sets have been there for me. But, it’s Mother’s Day weekend, so dads are getting …

A beat up truck pulled into the middle of the field in Afghanistan during half-time, and a man and woman, both blindfolded and screaming, were pushed out. Another man, holding a microphone, told the crowds watching from the stands the sins of the two prisoners. Before he finished speaking, the guards escorting the two picked up their stones. They hurled them at two faces, two backs, two chests.
The whole thing was hard to watch, really, even in a movie theater when you knew the people were actors. I glanced …

John + MJ from Pistil Films on Vimeo.
video: jade sullivan
photo: ben williams
song: kurt vile

I thought this was interesting this morning: Ron Judd, staff columnist at The Seattle Times asked a similar question in today’s paper that I asked yesterday: Do author’s fabrications undo his good deeds?
I understand Mortenson’s claim of and right for “literary license,” and if the purpose was to just to sell books, the practice is questionable at best. But when the story is spoken as truth at fundraising events, and then money given to charity is used to promote and buy more books to keep it at the top of …

When does a little bit of corruption justify a whole lot of good?
Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea has been on my reading list (and on my shelf) for almost two years.
And now Jon Krakauer has published an e-book, Three Cups of Deceit that you can read on byliner.com. It’s free to download until tomorrow.
I finished reading it, and if Krakauer’s investigation is correct, it’s disheartening to all of us that work in the education realm of non-profits.
I’m slightly ashamed of myself that I put off reading what is supposedly …